Two Years On: Haiti's Tech Legacy

Today is the second anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake which devastated Haiti, killing up to 316,000 people and making millions more homeless...While debates rage on about the best way to clear up the quake and continue to care for survivors - and there are plenty of controversies involving misappropriated funds and inappropriate volunteer responses - one thing that Haiti will be noted for is the response of the tech community to the disaster.

It would be wrong to overplay the impact high tech solutions had, and a report published last year (Lessons from Haiti: Media, Information System and Communities) cautions against just this. But Haiti was a proving ground for new, IT inspired ideas in disaster relief. Partly this is because of its geography (Haiti lies just 700 miles off of the Miami coast) and partly it's because of the timing, just as the mobile phone was becoming ubiquitous...