Haiti

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, shockwaves of pain spread around the globe, and like millions of others, I felt the need to the help. I texted HAITI to 90999 and gave $10 to Red Cross Relief -- a campaign that has since raise millions of dollars. But I made my real contribution by helping to spread the word about http://haiti.ushahidi.com.

Ushahidi, which is Swahili for “testimony,” is an innovative platform that crowd-sources crisis information and was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the United Nations OCHA/Colombia branch has used Ushahidi for coordinating humanitarian response during the Bogota earthquake simulation. Other notable deployments of the free crowd-sourcing platform are election monitoring in India, Lebanon, Mexico and Afghanistan among others. And now Haiti -- where the tool is already having an impact on the ground!