The past seven days Faisal Chohan a TEDFellow has been feverishly working to establish an incident reporting website at http://pakrelief.crowdmap.com/ to monitor the flooding situation in Pakistan. This is technically a Ushahidi platform connected to an SMS shortcode allowing people with cell phones to give live updates of issue on the ground. Ideally this incident reporting portal should then be used by humanitarian relief organizations to adequately divert resources where needed.
To submit an incident all you need to do is sto end message Type FL “Your needs/ situation/emergency” and send it to FL 3441. It will cost the user Rs. 2.00 per message. You can also send the report to pkfloods@gmail.com or fill out this incident reporting form on the website. After proper verification of the incident which may even mean calling the incident reporter back it shall be shared with the world. Read more about his effort at the TED Fellows Blog. He is slowly ironing out the bugs with tremendous cooperation from the International community of technologists and an amazing team on the ground in Pakistan.
Comments
3 responses to “Flood Relief Incident Reporting goes Live”
Good work doctor
sounds good!
but how it could be translated into real help? which has already become a huge task and also require enormous resources.
The current challenge is to spread right message to the flood affected people. The next challenge is to validate and parse messages. We are building team and collaborations for both the efforts.