Patrick Meier

See the following -

11 Ways To Get Involved With Humanitarian FOSS

Lending a digital hand for humanitarian projects is just a click away. Whether you have five minutes or a few hours, you can make a difference with a variety of Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects. The level of skills required vary from web search, verification, mapping, translation, training, and open source software development. Along the journey of changing the world, you can meet like minds and hone your skills. The key is to ask yourself: What do I want to do? How can I get started? How can I find the right project and community?

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Drones Spread Wings From War Zones To Disaster Areas

While lawmakers around the world struggle to keep up with the growth in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — commonly known as drones — innovation and community participation are changing how this weapon of modern warfare can be used for humanitarian purposes. Read More »

How AI, Twitter And Digital Volunteers Are Transforming Humanitarian Disaster Response

Katie Collins | Wired | September 30, 2013

On 24 September a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck south-west Pakistan, killing at least 300 people. The following day Patrick Meier at the [QCRI] received a call from the UN [OCHA] asking him to help deal with the digital fallout -- the thousands of tweets, photos and videos that were being posted on the web containing potentially valuable information about the disaster. Read More »

How Ushahidi Maps The Voices Of Those In Need

Dominic Burbidge | FreeSpeechDebate | November 12, 2012

Dominic Burbidge discusses how Ushahidi’s transformative crowdsourcing techniques have alleviated crises in Kenya and beyond. Read More »

Open Source for Humanitarian Action

Brandon Keim | Stanford Social Innovation Review | December 1, 2012

In the days following the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, chaos prevailed. Transportation was limited, if not impossible. Lines of communication were broken. A few radio stations continued to broadcast, but the disaster’s scale was overwhelming. Only one form of mass communication remained relatively intact: cellular phones. Even before the disaster, there had been only 108,000 landbased telephone lines in the country, compared with 3.5 million mobile phones. After the earthquake, mobile communications, particularly text messages, were one of the few means by which people could report their needs and location...

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The Life-Saving Power Of Crowdsourcing

Russ Linden | Governing | January 23, 2013

"The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed." There's a good deal of truth in science-fiction author William Gibson's observation. One of the most interesting and powerful aspects of our future--a tool that has the potential to take us a long way toward distributing information to where it can do the most good--is the phenomenon known as "crowdsourcing." Read More »

When the United Nations Calls, MicroMappers Acts

Open source and crowdsourcing—uttering these words at a meeting of the United Nations before the year 2010 would have made you persona non grata. In fact, the fastest way to discredit yourself at any humanitarian meeting just five years ago was to suggest the use of open source software and crowdsourcing in disaster response. Then, a tragic earthquake occured in Haiti in 2010, and OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi were deployed in the aftermath. Their use demonstrated the potential of free and open source crowdsourcing platforms in humanitarian contexts. Then, Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines occured five years later. What technology was used?...

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