The National Geographic Society has a long history of crisis mapping disasters. But what happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010 would forever change the very concept of a crisis map. A devastating earthquake struck the country's capital that Tuesday afternoon. I was overwhelmed with emotions when I heard thw news just an hour later. Over 100,000 people were feared dead. Some very close friends of mine were doing research in Port-au-Prince at the time and I had no idea whether they had survived the earthquake. So I laughed a live crisis map of Haiti. But this was an emotional plan with a detailed trategy. I was in shock and felt the need to do something, anything. It was only after midnigh that I finally got an SMS reply from my friends. They had narrowly escaped a collapsing building. But many, many others were not near as lucky. I continue mapping. This is what the map looked like after midnight on January 13. What was I mapping exactly? Tweets. I had found a dozen Haitians tweeting live from Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake. They were describing scenes of devasgation but also hope.

I added these Twitter users to my inbox and began mapping the most urgen Tweets (those that had enough geographic information to be mapped). The following night, several friends joined me in the living room of my dorm to help map Haiti's needs. 

But within a couple days, we couldn't keep up with the vast amount of information being reported via both social media and mainstream media. So I reached out to friends at The Fletcher School  (Tufts University) where I was doing my PhD. Be the end of the week, we had over 100 graduate students on how to monitor social anf mainstream media for relevant, mappable content. These "digital humanitarians" began to manually monitor hundreds and hundreds of online sources for information on Haiti almost 24/7. The Ushahidi Haiti Crisis Map became a live map with some 2,000 individual reports added during the entire project.

Soon enough, we began receiving thousands of text messages. Many volunteers joined the cause after hearing about the need for volunteers via Facebook.

On January 19, just a week after a earthquake, someone from U.S. Coast Guard emailed us with the following question:

 "I am compiling reports from Haiti for the U.S. Coast Guard and Join Task Force Command Center. Is there someone I can speak with about how better to use the information in Ushahidi?." 

Several days later, we set up  a delicated Skype chat with the Coast Guard to fast - forwad the most urgent (and actionalble) content that was being added to the Haiti Crisis Map. We were also contacted by an American Search and Rescue team in Port-au-Prince who urgently needed GPS coordinators for the locations of trapped individuals.

On January 22, the U.S. Marine Corps got in touch with us via email: 

"I am with the U.S. Marine Corps. I am stateside assisting the 22 MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit] coming off the U.S.S. Bataan [On the Haitian Coast]. We want to use your data to bring aid to the people of Haiti right now. The USMC is focusing on Leogane, Grand Goave, and Petit Goave. Is there a way to import your data into Google Earth of GIS? We want to make this work for the people of Haiti... please let know ASAP!".

 Five days later, the same contact from the U.S Marine Corps shared the following by email (which we got permission to make public):

"I can't overemphasize to you what the work of the Ushahidi/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation in moving too fast. Here is one from the 22 MEU: 'We had data on an area outside of Grand Goave needing help. Today, we sent an assessment team out there to validate their needs and everything checked out. While the team was out there, they found two old women and young girl with serious injuries from the earthquake; one of the women had critical respiratory issues. They were evacuted.'

Your site saved these people's lives. I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kind of stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most. We did have a tech barrier that we had to surmount. The Marines downrange have Google Earth ang your site does not work on the ship for them. So, I had Georgia Tech create a bridge from your site to Google Earth.

But it is YOUR data and YOUR work that is putting aid and assistance directly on the target and saving lives. Our big gap right now is locating NGOs and where they are working. Your site is helping with that. Keep up the good wotk!! You're making the biggest difference of anything I have seen out there in the open source world."

These incredible efforts following the Haiti earthquake demonstrated a huge potential for the future of humanitarian response. Student volunteers in Boston working online with the Diaspora using free mapping technology from Africa could help save lives in another country thousands of miles away without ever setting foot in said country. In time, these reactive and organic volunteer-driven efforts in Haiti, and those that followed that same year in Chile, Pakistan, and Russia, led to the launch of the award-winning Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a global network of 850+ volunteers in more than 80 countries around the world who use their live mapping skills to support humanitarian [and] human rights development and media prganizations.