Tag: Standby Task Force

In a previous post, we wrote about how ICTs were helping people all around the world respond to the Nepal earthquake. Today, Luther Jeke takes a closer look at the mapping efforts during the response.

Do you remember where you were the morning of April 25, 2015? I will never forget. I was at my home in Washington D.C. catching up on emails and the news. I was shattered when I saw the headlines for the earthquake in Nepal. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that was going to later claim more than 8,800 lives and injured more than 23,000.

I’m based in Washington D.C. through the Atlas Corps fellowship and have Nepali friends in the fellowship here as well. After getting the details of the devastation in Nepal from several news sources, I reached out to the other Nepali fellows, including Samita Thapa, who is based at TechChange. I knew that Nepalis who were living abroad may feel helpless being so far away and I had the thought: what if they could volunteer digitally?

Nepali volunteers

I have been a member of the Standby Task Force (SBTF) since 2011. The SBTF organizes digital volunteers into a flexible, trained and prepared network ready to deploy in crises. Launched at the 2010 International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010), the SBTF was created “to streamline online volunteer support for crisis mapping, following the lessons learned in Haiti, Chile and Pakistan, and to provide a dedicated interface for the humanitarian community.”

But just having a digital mapping community isn’t enough. Having local information and networks on the ground is crucial, so the three of us coordinated a group of Nepali volunteers to assist the SBTF digital humanitarian efforts that mapped the Nepal earthquake by analyzing social media content. Together, we were able to recruit around 200 Nepali volunteers who tirelessly helped the mapping team by feeding, translating, and verifying information from our social media network in and out of Nepal. We were constantly on Facebook, Twitter, and Skype over a period of two weeks to help with this digital humanitarian deployment and to map the crisis.

The Mappers

We helped the SBTF collect, verify and map over 1,000 lines in the information management database of the Nepal earthquake. About 5 million tweets were processed by the Artificial Intelligence in Disaster Relief platform (AIDR). Our volunteer group was instrumental in helping the SBTF click through more than 60,000 images and 10,000 messages that were being geolocated onto this map below, with around 200 volunteers joining the Nepal Advisors deployment.

Nepal Earthquake on MicroMappers
Tweets and images geolocated by SBTF volunteers on MicroMappers

The data was used by many humanitarian organisations like Doctors Without Borders, Nepal Youth Foundation, Government of Nepal, governments of various other countries responding to the earthquake, and more. It has been used to assist and accelerate the coordination of humanitarian groups on the ground. We processed an extraordinary range of data streams during the 12 days of the deployment and geolocated pictures and messages of needs and offers of assistance, provided maps and tables and supported other organisations and groups to streamline their processes. Our team worked closely with many other groups throughout this deployment. You can read about our efforts and success over on the SBTF blog.

I have learned from my mentor, Patrick Meier that anyone can be a digital humanitarian. All you need is a big heart and access to the Internet. I reached out to the Standby Task Force and with huge efforts from Medha and Samita, we founded a volunteer group of Nepalis to digitally support the work of the SBTF in Nepal. To learn more or to get involved, check out their website here. They can alway use your support whenever disaster strikes.

Digital mapping has been used in disaster response, maternal health, WASH programs, and more. Interested in learning more ways mapping is being used for social good? Sign up for our upcoming Mapping for Social Good online course now!

About Luther


Luther is an Atlas Corps Technology for Development Fellow serving at Creative Associates International (Creative). Luther provides support to the Technology for Development (T4D) unit which is responsible for incubating new ideas of how to use technology interventions at Creative. Learning about the latest in information and communication technologies for development and contributing innovative solutions are his two key missions at Creative. He has four year of experience in the nonprofit sector, and earned a Bachelor’s of Arts in Sociology and has a wealth of experience in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. In his most recent capacity as iLabLiberia’s Director of Training, he and his team provided more than 3,000 Liberian and foreign nations the opportunity to use the innovation lab and gain new technology skills. You can learn more about Luther here.

This post originally appeared on the Atlas Corps blog.

Interested in our upcoming course: Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding? Our next class starts Monday, February 18th. Apply today!

This week, Ushahidi announced the launch of the Uchaguzi partnership in preparation for the upcoming March 4th Kenya elections with the aim “to help Kenya have a free, fair, peaceful, and credible general election.” This announcement came after the Standby Task Force (SBTF) sent an email on February 8th informing their community of voluntary crowdmappers that the SBTF has withdrawn from Ushahidi’s map for not meeting their criteria for activation, but still encouraged their community to participate as individuals. The announcement surprised some in the Standby Task Force community, which had been preparing for deployment, but was not entirely unexpected after the SBTF’s decision to focus on deploying to “natural” disasters after their experience in Syria. The official email explained that:

“The things that we use to ensure that the security, ethics and neutrality that the SBTF stands for is protected, that there is a feedback loop (a physical, on-the-ground response to the data processed by Mapsters) and that we do no harm, e.g. we don’t damage existing in-country responses.”

The notion that external support could be counter-productive is an issue worth considering for the voluntary technical community of peacebuilders. The rise of both local crowdmapping and the global volunteer and technical communities have grown together over the past five years after the violence stemming from the last Kenyan elections gave rise to the Ushahidi platform and the Haiti earthquake saw the development of a global volunteer networks to apply them. Since that time, it’s become clear that the ethical questions surrounding application of technology to peacebuilding are as complex as ensuring technical capability, if not more so.

The challenge of protecting the privacy and security of citizen users is constantly grappled with by the organizations responsible for these tools. The upcoming Kenyan election offers a unique case to take stock of where we stand and where we are moving. Which is why it will form the basis for an activation simulation in TC109: Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. As part of the activity, we’ll be talking with Justine MacKinnon of the Standby Task Force and Rob Baker of Ushahidi. To understand more thoroughly the opportunities for new technologies to empower peacebuilders.

Of course the ethical impact of new technology is not limited to crowdsourcing, which is why we’re also going to discuss the full spectrum of issues in TC109, from using drones to protect human rights with Mark Hanis to using MapBox to display drone strikes on Pakistan in real-time. New technology often presents as many problems as it solves, and application of even the most potentially beneficial new tools without sufficient forethought can always cause more harm than good.

Class starts on Monday. We hope to see you there! Please feel free to tweet @techchange if you have any questions or send us an email: info [at] techchange.org.