Crowdsourcing Good: Haiti

The earthquake in Haiti is becoming the latest focus of "do-good" efforts across the social innovation landscape, and social media are playing a key role in the rescue attempts.

The nonprofit Catholic Relief Services is using Skype and Facebook in its efforts; Oxfam is making use of the audio blog site, ipadio, to communicate updates from the ground. There are also some social media startups helping to make rescue efforts easier by crowdsourcing crisis information. Ushahidi, a social media platform, is one of the more prominent examples of a social enterprise that hit the ground running within hours after the quake, deploying Haiti.ushahidi.com to give people real-time information of what is happening on the ground -- whether it's the arrival of supplies and medical equipment or the outbreak of post-quake looting or violence.

Ushahidi -- which means "testimony" in Swahili -- was initially created as an early-warning system amid the savage, inter-tribal violence that followed the Kenyan presidential election in late 2007. A government ban on live media throughout that crisis made Ushahidi one of the only places where citizens could share information about the attacks.

In Haiti, Ushahidi is again producing Web-centralized "heat maps" -- visualizations of places in the ravaged city where civic passions overheat or where help is most concentrated and available. If Haitians can "see" where violence and/or aid is concentrated in real-time, says cofounder David Kobaya, they can manage their survival more effectively. Further, those sending aid can target it more precisely to the people and the areas that need it the most.

Ushahidi is asking citizens to call, text, or email site editors with eye-witness reports or accounts passed along from people on the ground; the nonprofit then aggregates the reports and makes a map, which is posted and updated in close to real-time. The more people who send in information, the better; Kobaya says more information tends to verify itself over time. [For more on Ushahidi, see "Mob Protection," a Cause Global profile of Ushahidi from September 2008.]

But Ushahidi is just one enterprise offering to help in Haiti. Let us know what you and your companies are doing to help. Here are some early examples:

* Justmeans community member Dave Stangis reports that many companies are pledging millions of dollars in aid. Campbell Soup, for example, is contributing at least $200,000 to Haiti and putting a process in place for employees to make contributions.

* Justmeans community member Liquidnet is matching all donations up to $25K for Haiti relief.

* Early on, Haitian singer Wyclef Jean sent out the following appeal on Twitter before most aid agencies knew whether their people on the ground were safe: "Haiti needs your help if you r in the US text Yele to 501 501 and 5 dollars will go toward earthquake relief in Haiti. International donations can be made athttp://www.yele.org."

* techPresident is reporting that SMS donations to the Red Cross are being passed through without any carrier fees or processing fees, with the Mobile Giving Foundation and MGive handling the transactions and declining to take a cut. Texting HAITI to 90999 sends $10 USD to the Red Cross. It seems to be working so far: within a few hours of the operation on Wednesday, the program had raised more than $800,000 from about 75,000 individual contributions, according to Red Cross officials. According mocoNews.net, a news blog covering digital media, mGive's co-founder and chairman, James Eberhard, was awakened in Pakistan by U.S. State Department social media advisor Alec Ross shortly after the quake, so as to help get the short code up and running. Since then, #Haiti and #RedCross have all become major trending topics on Twitter, mocoNews reports.

* The State Department is tweeting updates from the ground and from Washington.

* Partners in Health, led by Dr. Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains), is leading an aggressive online fundraising drive for the country in which it has been working for many years now.

*Hundreds of tweets per minute are pouring into Twitter's #haiti hashtag feed, providing added perspectives to the digital narrative of the suffering, and Twitter user @troylivesay, based in Port-au-Prince, has been posting updates of the aftermath. His tweets have included: "Leaving to look for a list of people; will try hard to report back" and "church groups are singing throughout the city all through the night in prayer. It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy."

* GlobalVoicesonline.com, a crowdsourced news site from citizen journalists around the globe, is providing first-person accounts from the ground and independent news stories since minutes after the quake.

* Twitpicsphotographs taken on mobile phones and transmitted instantly around the world via Twitterare helping to provide a visual narrative of the suffering, both to the public at large as well as to established news organizations, including CNN, which otherwise would not have had access to immediate video and photographs of the devastation. @CarelPedre, the Twitter handle for Carel Pedre -- one of Haiti's most popular radio and TV hosts -- is sending out dozens of photographs (including the one illustrating this post, above). Check updates on his Twitter feed.

* Dozens of Twitter lists are being created to share detailed information from the ground. See, for example, @georgiap/live-from-haiti

* Msnbc.com is providing this list of #charity organizations active in Haiti.

What are you or your companies and social enterprises doing to help?

Please help us compile a more complete list of aid groups, companies, and social enterprises organizing aid to Haiti so that, as the crisis unfolds, we've got a running tally of some of the Justmeans' community's efforts to help.