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Open Source Makes an Impact in Haiti

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on February 2, 2010 at 8:00 am

The devastating earthquake in Haiti has people coming together and offering help in the form of money, supplies, services, and much more. An organization called Crisis Commons is helping groups of geeks do what they do best: build technology solutions to help the relief efforts. CrisisCamp events have been held all over the world, including one here in Portland, OR, with a focus on building technology solutions based on actual needs and requests. These projects are all community driven and released under open source licenses for people to use and build on without any restrictions.

Some of these applications are already being used in Haiti to help the relief efforts. Here are a couple of examples:

• An open source mobile phone app that provides Creole-English language translations for iPhone and Android.
• A digital map to help relief groups in Haiti coordinate their efforts.
• Upgrades to network software to improve WiFi speeds.

There are still many more projects underway, and you can still contribute to a variety of projects. Visit the Crisis Commons wiki for details on specific projects, upcoming CrisisCamp events, and other ways to contribute your technical skills to help with the relief efforts.

Categories: Open Source
Tags: crisis commons, crisiscamp, haiti, Open Source

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Comments (1)

February 4, 2010 4:11 PM PST Amanda Marvel (Intel) Total Points: 1,590 Registered User

Hi @Dawn, Thanks for posting this! I also took part, but at CrisiCamp Silicon Valley that was held at Yahoo a few weeks back. It was such a rewarding experience to actually be able to help from a remote location. I'd like to add that CrisisCamp is open to all levels of technical backgrounds as well as non-tech. I fall in to the non-tech category and worked on a People Finder project whereby a mashup had been created to pull queries from several local Haitian websites from people looking for loved ones, and I would match this up to Google and ensure the record was also listed there. Although I would have hoped for more, there were a handful of people that had been found and called for a quick mini-celebration before moving on to the next record. All in all the group took over 3000 queries down to nil. I'd encourage anyone who has some spare time to check this out and get involved. Cheers! Amanda

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