Haiti Earthquake Information: connecting people in need with the information they need.
Immediate Goal: There are reports of large groups of people on the outskirts of PAP and surroundings, who have still received no food relief. This is now the focus of this project, and will remain a major focus for the next days and weeks while we work urgently to identify these groups, verify that they still critically need food, and set up specific cases with procedures for following each case through to completion, for example using a CaseTracker feature which we are now developing.
There are reports now of documented deaths due to starvation, so it is absolutely critical to get food immediately to these starving groups of people.
The Haiti Earthquake Information Project is now involved with identifying and expediting aid to groups whose current status can be verified by phone on site - either a cellphone or a landline, as long as it is working. We also now have contacts on the ground in Haiti who have identified such groups, and verified ongoing need by directly visiting those groups.
Most of these remaining urgent need cases are likely to be on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. However, we can help any group that has not yet received food aid, regardless of location, as long as they are close enough to PAP to be reached by the eight NGOs working with the World Food Programme to deliver food in that region.
There are several ways to identify groups who still have not received food aid since the January 12 earthquake.
1) Outreach to the Haitian community, both inside and outside Haiti, to find people who know of such groups of people. This may be the most important approach to find such groups. One of our project members, Chi Chi Valenti has been tweeting the following, in order to find people who know of such groups stil in need:
#haiti #offer Still waiting for first food aid in PAP? Working phone on site? http://haiti-earthquake-information.org/ pls RT
AND
any group of 100+ in PAP with cell onsite who has gotten no #food aid since EQ #haiti DM me or email chichi AT jackiefactory.com pl RT
You may be able to create your own tweets that work better for you. Also ReTweeting (RTing) such messages to your own groups of contacts should be useful for quickly creating a large network of people who might know about such specific needs cases.
2) Use of various web-based software tools or sites, such as our data mashup or Twitter search feed software (described below). Ushahidi "reports" describing such groups of people, can also be a good starting point.
We have already identified several confirmed cases of large numbers without aid and have been working with the World Food Programme (WFP) and various NGOs and other groups on the ground to arrange food distribution. We welcome your help in finding and confirming more current cases:
If you hear of a group of 10 or more persons who have not received food aid since the earthquake and has a working cellphone or landline, please do these two steps:
1) Confirm via phone that the group has NOT received any aid to date, and get as exact an address, location, and head count as possible, as well as the name of the person you spoke to on site.
2) Email all of this information to Michael Caudy at mcaudy@gmail.com. If a report already exists at http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ please copy the report URL and include it in your email.
Please be sure to notify him on VERIFIED RECENT CASES only - as we are asking for urgent emergency assistance, we must make sure that these cases are indeed the most urgent.
The Haiti Earthquake Information software project is a set of web-based communication and information exchange tools, built on the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). One of the web search tools that we have developed to rapidly identify groups who still need aid is this Drupal-based feed for an automatically updated Twitter search using the #haiti #need search hashtags:
*Twitter feed #hait #need search with casetracker: http://dev.haiti-earthquake-information.org/feeds/11
*Note: the CaseTracker feature is not yet fully functional, so please don't use it, the but Twitter search feed is working and can be used as one way to identify groups that may still be in urgent need of food relief.
*For example: one group that our Twitter searches has revealed, and which appeared to urgently need assistance is this large group at Villa Manrese:
*Villa Manrese: There are 1000+ people who have been camping in the garden at Villa Manrese, on the southern perimeter of Port au Prince. According to the Ushahidi report for this case, as January 31, these people had received essentially no food relief since the January 12 earthquake
*Here is the Ushahidi report for this group: http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/2012
There are similar reports of many more large groups of people on the outskirts of PAP and surroundings, who have still received no food relief.
Over the past several days, there have been effort to establish direct contact with the World Food Programme, and then via the WFP, to contact with the specific NGO on the ground in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. Once a new case of critical food need is identified and verified, it is submitted to the WFP, where it can be authorized for emergency food delivery, and forwarded to the appropriate NGO.
One of our project members, Chi Chi Valenti, has also been communicating with others on Facebook since the earthquake, and she recently set up a Facebook page describing our project and how others can work with us to help these groups of starving people in Haiti. For example, she has found through a contact she knows in Haiti that there is another large group, of about 500 people, who have been camped in a parking lot at the Cercle Bellevue Club. This group also has had essentially no food relief since the Jan. 12 earthquake. That contact has visited that camp again, and confirmed that there still has been no food relief, so that case has been verified and submitted to the WFP for authorization for immediate food delivery.
Chi Chi's Facebook page for this project is below (note that you have to join this Facebook group in order to see this Facebook Discussion.)
*http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=252988675717&topic=18270