Ushahidi is an African non-profit tech company that develops free and open-source software for live mapping crowdsourced information. The word Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili and the group’s mission is to democratize mapping. The Ushahidi platform has been used in over 30 countries including Afghanistan, Sudan and Colombia for disaster response, human rights monitoring, election monitoring, etc.

Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi, will highlight how the platform was used in response to the Haiti earthquake and the floods in Pakistan. Craig Fugate, the head of FEMA, called the Ushahidi-Haiti map the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community. How did Ushahidi volunteers pull this off and save hundreds of lives? How did they crowdsource tens of thousands of text messages directly from the disaster affected population? How did they translate, tag and geo-locate this information in near real-time? In sum, how can hacking save lives in major disasters?

Speaker: Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. Patrick has consulted for several international organizations including on numerous crisis mapping and early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and is currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute’s (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School. Patrick blogs at iRevolution.net.