Haiti: A call to "peoplefinder" site builders - open your data!
haitigoogle.gif
An open letter from Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Director of the MIT
Center for Future Civic Media, concerning the sites set up by news
organizations to help find people in Haiti. Chris has a suggestion for
making these efforts more effective. A post on the New York Times says
they've made their data available to Google. No word from CNN.
Christopher writes:
In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many organizations
worked to create sites where people could find one another, or least
information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has been
undermined by its success: within 24 hours it became clear that there
were too many places where people were putting information, and each
site is a silo. The site Haitianquake.com began "scraping" --
mechanically aggregating -- the most popular such sites, like
http://koneksyon.com and American Red Cross Family Links. As people
within the IT community recognized the danger of too many unconnected
sites, and Google became interested in helping, they turned their work
over to Google which is now running an embeddable application at
haiticrisis.appspot.com.
We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into
developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make
their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the
Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful
reunions. Data from the google site is currently available as "dumps" in
the standard PFIF format (on this page), and an API is being developed,
and licensed through Creative Commons. I am not affiliated with Google
-- indeed, this is a volunteer initiative by some of their engineers --
but this is one case where their reach and capacity can help the most
people.
[permaculture] Haiti: A call to "peoplefinder" site builders - open your data! Boing Boing,
Lawrence F. London, Jr., 01/17/2010