It’s now more than a week since the Caribbean nation of Haiti was rocked by a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake, but the situation on the ground remains unstable, with people still being pulled from the rubble and the death toll continuing to rise.
With landlines in the country badly damaged, and ground transportation a significant problem, relief workers pouring into the country have had to turn to non-traditional means to try to get information from – and to – survivors of the quake.
Ushahidi, an open-source crisis-reporting platform first developed two years ago to track post-election violence in Kenya, has provided one of those non-traditional data streams, offering "near-real time disaster response" data to everyone from the Red Cross, to the United Nations, Charity: Water, the Clinton Foundation, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and State Department, and more.
