From Cultures of Participation to the Rise of Crisis Mapping in a Networked World

Abstract

Secretary Clinton’s timely comments mark the beginning of an exciting new epoch, an era in which public participation at a global level occurs en masse and in real time. In one case, an individual caught underneath the rubble after an earthquake in Port-au-Prince uses her phone to send an SOS via a text message. One thousand miles away, an offi ce worker logs on during her lunch break to translate SOS texts from Haitian Creole, her native language, into English. In another city, students far from the disaster stay up all night reading these translated real-time texts. When the students are not able to identify the street name or neighborhood on any current map of Haiti, the Haitian diaspora again shares its local knowledge, improving existing maps as well as helping to identify the trapped person’s location. Still others, far from the scene of the emergency, work from home combing the web and social media services like Facebook and Twitter to fi nd and share contextual, up-to-the-minute information about the emergency as quickly as possible to those on the other side of the globe. A group of students uses this information to create geo-referenced, real-time situation reports. This global, emergent collaboration offers emergency responders the best, most comprehensive source of contextual information currently available about the area in crisis. Translated and geo-referenced SMS texts connect emergency responders to survivors on the ground. The information that emerges from this collaboration helps save lives.

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