When I called David Kobia to launch the Ushahidi platform two hours after the earthquake, our priority was to map all relevant reports in near real-time and to do so around the clock. This meant monitoring Tweets, Facebook groups, list serves, emails, online news media, blogs, radio and television programs, and now incoming SMS. That’s not all, we also needed to turn this information into semi-structured reports and actually geo-tag them. No small task. That is why I immediately set up the Haiti Situation Room at The Fletcher School and why my Fletcher colleagues have since set up similar Situation Rooms in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland.
