It’s now a year since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in which over 230,000 people died and two million people became homeless. The devastation to the country’s social, health and physical infrastructures continue to cause enormous problems for the country’s population in its attempt to recover.
But this disaster happened in 2010, a year in which rapid developments in digital media technologies are transforming every aspect of life. How has digital media changed the shape of a disaster event in the case of the Haiti earthquake?
Donor response
News of the earthquake spread instantly and incredibly soon after the earthquake, dozens of NGOs were raising funds (and some continue) for the relief effort using digital tools on the web. Co-ordination between UK NGOs via the DEC has raised £101 million, and web and text message based fundraising was at the heart of the fundraising efforts for Haiti. This didn’t feel spectacularly new, which says a lot – rewind just 6 years to the Asian Tsunami and the DEC was heavily dependent on telephone lines (3000 of them) and human beings to process funds.
In its current fundraising effort (for the Pakistan Floods), the DEC provides the following options (in order):
- Donate online
- Text to give
- Post
- CAF card
(I suspect the first two are the ones that really matter in terms of scale – it would be interesting to hear from DEC the relative proportions of the four different methods used to process donations).
The campaign for donation used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter (where people passed the donation link and text message number around their networks) and YouTube (where videos could be quickly and easily distributed around social networks and blogs).
The emergence of social media in recent years has enabled ordinary members of the public to spread awareness of the issues and fundraising efforts around their networks in an unprecedented way, allowing them to become part of the media effort in donor countries.
Digital tools in rich countries certainly have helped to accelerate the fundraising response through providing easy-to-scale methods for processing payments, and the socialisation of media which enabled people to participate in the spreading of awareness of the disaster, and the information about how to contribute to the response.
With websites and media channels such as YouTube, donor organisations like DEC are able to feed back to their donors directly on the impact of their donations. This is a vast improvement on traditional broadcast “news” media, which often becomes disinterested in events on the other side of the world once they’ve stopped becoming ‘new’.
Here’s a video on the DEC site from Oxfam, showing how money raised is being used for the new challenge, moving from temporary response to rebuilding communities:
In many ways, the examples above are merely the perfecting of the structure of responses to international emergency disasters that began long before web technologies… the DEC was founded in 1963 and fundraising for the relief effort has a long and distinguished history in the UK. What the perfecting of these Web 1.0 technologies have done is to make the efforts of these institutions far more effective – reducing the costs associated with raising funds, and we’ve begun to see new interactive Web 2.0 services starting to enable ordinary people to join the communication effort to spread awareness.
Texts, maps, crowdsourcing and communicating the response on the ground
A new report, “Media, Information System and Communities: Lessons from HAITI” from InterNews, Communications with Disaster Affected Communities and the Knight Foundation has looked at the use of digital media technologies in the response to the disaster. Of course, within the disaster setting on the ground, communications are vital for shaping an effective on the ground response.
As the introduction to the report says,
…the Haiti earthquake also marked the beginning of
a new culture in disaster relief. Occurring several years
into a revolution in communications technology, the event
attracted legions of media specialists bearing new digital
tools to help.
Haiti became a learning opportunity for the use of SMS (texting) services, radio-cell phones and collaborative mapping. Partnerships were hastily put together, new approaches tried and experiences and learning gained.
The reports highlights three observations:
1. Traditional humanitarian organizations were often open to the new technologies, but remain nervous about the implications of information and powersharing through crowdsourcing and other new
media platforms.2. Joint humanitarian communities demonstrated that there were many beneficial ways to use digital media in the crisis setting, particularly texting functions.
3. Although much of the attention has been paid to new media technologies, radio was the most effective tool for serving the needs of the public. The first media priority in Haiti was to restore radio service (as it was in the tsunami and other recent crises).
The first observation is typical of the challenges that new media brings to the people trying to take advantage of them – new media forms don’t just mean new ways of communicating… they mean new and often unfamiliar ways of working. As the report quotes “new media activists”,
Technology is easy. Community is hard.
One of the newest uses of technology was crowdsourcing maps using a system called Ushahidi (Swahili for Witness) – a digital platform developed in Kenya after election violence in 2008. It enables the rapid aggregation of information onto a map from news sources, on the ground text and multimedia messages and directly uploaded reports.
Here is the Haiti Ushahidi based map. And here is the initial Haiti Ushahidi installation.
This platform enabled people on the ground, who knew more about their own situation than anyone else, to drive the information set that those involved in the rescue effort were using.
One of the difficult tensions was between the approach taken to information by the open source information culture epitomised by Ushahidi and official beuriocraccies who are more used to operating in an information culture governed by principles of secrecy, privacy and accountability. The report makes clear that one of the tensions introduced by these technologies was around the communications between organisations operating in these two cultures.
The good news is that the Ushahidi platform saved lives by making information useful and relevant and accessible on the ground. Here’s a video showing something of the use and impact of collaborative mapping in a disaster scenario through Ushahidi.
In the end, the effectiveness of the Ushahidi platform for organising information overcame any reluctance from official agencies to using it, with the US Marine Corps and FEMA using the system to find and rescue survivors.
Media changing the way things are done, not just the way things are communicated.
The evolving technologies used to mediate the international and on the ground responses when the Haiti earthquake occurred represent a landmark in the evolution of how these technologies are being applied to different situations. The high level of innovation and experimentation in Haiti shows how rapidly media platforms are capable of evolving these days, and have helped to improve the effectiveness of those responding to major humanitarian disasters. Lessons are still being learnt from Haiti and will they’ll be sure to inform how the international community responds to the next major emergency which will, sadly, inevitably happen one day.
