The International Crisis Mapping conference kicked off today, bringing people together to discuss new strategies and tools in crisis mapping. Robert and Tom are there from Development Seed and are looking forward to catching up with friends from the Pan American Health Organization, InSTEDD, Open Street Map, Ushahidi, Human Rights Watch, and the Knight Foundation, and to meet new people working in this field.
This morning Robert gave an Ignite Talk on using Drupal as a crisis mapping platform. One problem faced in crisis mapping is that while every crisis is different and has unique needs, each needs a response platform that can be turned on instantly. Robert talked about some ways that Drupal can meet both of these needs and showed tools that we’ve built on Drupal to map results from the Afghan elections, coordinate GIS teams in Pakistan, and monitor news related to H1N1. He also announced next week’s release of a new version of Managing News, a news aggregator that can be used to track humanitarian crisis like the H1N1 outbreak (and anything else) that will be open source and free to download.
This afternoon Tom was on a panel discussing how mobile technology and satellite imagery can be used for data validation and dissemination. One project Tom talked about is SlingshotSMS, an open source sms server that interfaces with a wide range of GSM modems and cell phones, needs minimal configuration, and is small enough to run on a USB stick. This project is a great example of a open source win in the humanitarian community. It started with work done by Unicef in its RapidSMS project, and we were able to take that, tweak it, and get it running and targeting data collection work. SlingshotSMS can be downloaded from GitHub.
If you’d like to talk more about any of this work, look for Robert or Tom or stop by our table at the Tech Fair during lunch on Saturday or Sunday. They’ll be there demoing projects we’ve done with Drupal for data collection and crisis mapping and monitoring, as well as Managing News, and showing some of the custom maps we’ve made along the way.