Top Highlights

• Haiti response marked the start of something new. As one independent report later noted, first responders with the U.S. military “found imagery, digital open source maps, and websites that hosted them (such as Ushahidi and OpenStreetMap) to occasionally be of greater value than their own assets.”28
• The lesson was clear: an overflow of information and data can be as paralyzing as the absence of it when it comes to mobilizing disaster response efforts.
• As one colleague put it, “If you have ‘accurate’ information that is hours old, you do not have accurate information in the social media world.”
• the second was the proliferation of mobile communications technologies, the rise of social, digital media, and access to vast quantities of all kinds of data (digital text, SMS, tweets, satellite, and UAV imagery), all in the hands of anyone with the inclination, drive, and motivation to do something constructive with it.
• catalyst.