The power of the map

Standby Taskforce is one year old this month. It may already be the most important humanitarian movement you’ve never heard of .

It’s a group of people around the world who volunteer to put data on a map in a crisis. They are available at short notice and, thanks to their global reach, can operate round the clock.

That may not sound very exciting. It really is.

The Christchurch Recovery Map helped collate and organise information about which services open and closed and other data useful to residents affected by the New Zealand earthquake. Volunteers around the world analysed and verified reports and, by mapping them publicly, made them directly useful.

The same process has been used to sift information and make it useful following the Alabama tornadoes and Hurricane Yasi in Australia.

Standby Taskforce volunteers were asked to monitor, analyse and map dataflows around the conflict in Libya. They have provided high quality information to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs and trained UN online volunteers to carry on the work /.

Experiments with analysing satellite imagery of Somalia and providing live data about the evolving situation in Syria should inspire awe.

The Stanby Taskforce community has evolved out of the Ushahidi community: an open source crisis mapping project.

This is both inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. We now have the tools to show what is happening in real time in humanitarian crises across the globe.

Could crisis mapping have changed the course of the Rwandan genocide or the Balkan conflict? Or would we just have been better informed impotent spectators?

In one year Standby Taskforce has transformed the access to information for responders and for citizens in complex, difficult, crisis situations.

Imagine what it can achieve in it’s second year.

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