Virtual Volunteers Use Twitter And Facebook To Make Maps Of Nepal : Goats and Soda : NPR

Virtual Volunteers Use Twitter And Facebook To Make Maps Of Nepal : Goats and Soda : NPR: "A public relations executive in Toronto, she's on the board of directors of the Standby Task Force, a loose organization of several thousand digital volunteers around the globe who track, map and post news of damage and pleas for help when natural disasters strike. After the Nepal earthquake, she and other volunteers neglected sleep as they met in online chat rooms, trading tidbits and discussing how they can best help.

"I'm in 17 chat rooms right now, and thousands of lines behind in my reading," sighed Jen Ziemke, a political science professor at John Carroll University in Cleveland and co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers.

It was Crisis Mappers that helped focus on the potential of social media back in 2009, at a conference organized by Ziemke and co-founder Patrick Meier. The goal was to recruit online volunteers to analyze huge data sets. In other words: crowdsourcing, relying on volunteers to take a slice of a huge task, such as clicking through photos streaming from Nepal to identify where help is needed first."



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