• Scope

The scope, purpose and objectives are based on the 2010 Microsoft Imagine Cup Challenge for a nonprofit organization called NetHope.  I will be using the requirements outlined by NetHope but instead of providing the source code directly to NetHope, I will be making this project available to all a nonprofit organizations as an open source project.

• Purpose

An emergency (natural or man-made) may strike in the developing world. Emergency responders rush to provide the first rescue and relief services. Actionable and reliable information is needed so that lives can be saves and human suffering reduced.

The proliferation of mobile devices and social media presents an opportunity and a challenge to emergency responders. What information do you trust? How can responders’ aggregate trusted information to maximize the impact of their response efforts?  How can actions be shared to avoid duplication of efforts?

But at the same time all of this new information that is flowing through social media and other platforms causes an information overload that is hard to deal with. The number of information sources has also increased exponentially making it difficult to follow all the information coming in.

Whereas in certain cases NetHope might be interested in individual reports (like “a person is trapped underneath rubble at location X”), NetHope is in most cases more interested in discovering where there are patterns of reports coming in from the general public. So knowing what areas there are reports coming in from and the frequency and severity of the reports is most often more interesting than knowing that someone needs food and water at a particular location.

NetHope has had various attempts at managing crisis information coming from citizens, but most of those attempts have focused on the tools rather than the information itself and the processes through which the information needs to be processed before it can be acted upon.
 

• Objectives

• To offer a mobile web application that will leverage crowd sourcing to report crisis events to a humanitarian organizations on the Internet.
• To leverage the use of Web Services, to allow communication updating of information between the user’s portable device and social sites such as Twitter or Google Maps.
• To allow the crisis reports be posted to an existing social network that the humanitarian organizations are associated with. The crisis reports can support a short messages, a photo or video. The members of the humanitarian organizations can use this information to map where resources are needed.