Save people, use social media

Twitter and other social network sites are used for a lot of different reasons. Sharing interesting thoughts or just using it to tell your friends what you had eaten yesterday. A few days ago I read an interesting article where twitter was used for more serious reasons. Using twitter to offer help in times of a disaster.

Testimony
Ory Okolloh invented Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili. Ushahidi is a new technology which collects the information about the consequences of a disaster, given by regular people, and visualizes this information into a geographical map. Everyone who owns a mobile cell phone, an e-mail address or has access to internet can contribute information.

Purpose
First, it was used after the post-election fallout in Kenia to report violence. Because it was used by many people, they decided there was a need for a platform that could be used by people all over the world. Nowadays, their goal is ‘creating a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information’.

Haiti
After the earthquake in Haiti thousands of messages were send to provide information about the situation or where injured people could be found. During this disaster most information was send by mobile cell phone, while little people have access to the internet. After the messages were checked to be true, they were integrated in the geographical map. Hulporganisaties could use this information to work efficiently and are really enthusiastic about Ushahidi.



I have talked about a changing internet world and this is another example of the power of social media and the community. Ushahidi gives people the possibility to contribute during a disaster and makes it easier to offer help to victims. It is an example of crowd sourcing. Let the people participate and together they can create something. Maybe social media is not that bad after all…