It’s really great to be invited for a talk and hands-on workshop in ITW2012. In the talk, Crowdsourcing and Open Platform for Disaster Management, we mentioned four major open platforms and standard we currently leveraged for ICT enabled disaster management. Further, we introduced the fifth element, Tzu-Chi (慈濟), to put our tool into real practice. Tzu-Chi has more than one million volunteers all over the world and they so self-motivated for joining the disaster relief activities. Thus, they are the good end-users to us and willing to feedback for enhancing this ICT enabled solution.
In the 2 hours hands-on workshop on Friday (pictures here!), we were happy to meet and introduce the following items to the delegates from Thailand, Indonesia, India, Panama, and the Philippines.
1. Introduction to Ushahidi and Open GeoSMS
2. Installation of Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi App
3. KML import of Ushahidi for information aggregation
4. Configure the deployment site and update for the events
5. Incidents briefing and announce the phone number for submit reports
6. Kick off simulation and start submit report via internet or Open GeoSMS
7. Gather reports and confirm/decline those on Ushahidi
8. View those events on Ushahidi with time-line playback
We got various of users range from people who never use smart phone to the heavy data network user with iPhone/Android. We received great feedbacks and it’s glad to see them picking up those new ideas, then realize that they can embrace the power of crowdsourcing and openness. Sharing is always joyful, hope will see you guys soon!
GeoThings, slayer
[Please click on the photo to launch the Youtube video for more details]
The Fifth Element a cool sci-fiction on humanity sustainablilty in 1997. Last month, I had a discussion with @ilya on disaster management operatons, he suggested that “hey, it sounds like you have four clear modules on your platform, and THEY could be The Fifth Element!” I liked this metaphor and how he described it. I used it in a talk last weekend to address how ICT (Information and Communication Technology) not just could entertain, but help people.
The First Element is Open Street Map.
Open Street Map is Wiki-style Map resource service provider. We are confortable to what Google Maps has already provided to us in urban or sub-urban area. However, any disaster might happen in the middle of nowhere that even Google Street View vehicles have never been there before. This open platform allows the humanitarian support forces and volunteers to “map” the trail, POIs, and so on. You can even save the map resource on offline mode and that’s really really helpful for disaster response and management.
The Second Element is Ushahidi
Ushahidi is an open source platform, not only for server site; but also for mobile application on iPhone, iPad, and Android phone. Ushahidi has gained its reputation for its ease-of-deployment and openness. Ushahidi is also an crowdsourcing platform which allows people feedback and contribute what they see on-site. It then shows those events with map-based visualization, filtered with categories, and provides RESTful interface for other services or applications to retrive its database.
The Third Element is Sahana
Sahana is also an open source platform for disaster management. The power of Sahana is dealing with resource registration and match the needs and resources automatically. Sahana is so powerful that even few system administrators sometimes get a little confused and not able to fully utilize it. In the Resource Mapping System practice of Red Cross, we see Sahana Eden has successfully transformed its looking with a more user-friendly interface. We would further add the mobile app for Sahana so the Stand-by Task Force team could tackle right on what they are concerned with their own smart mobile in the emergency situations.
The Fourth Element is Open GeoSMS
Open GeoSMS is an open standard for encoding location information into SMS. It’s a made-in-Taiwan standard and now adopted in various scenarios from commercial LBS to disaster management. Open GeoSMS enables people to communicate location information on different apps, event different mobile platforms via SMS. We mashup Open Street Map, Ushahidi, Sahana, and Open GeoSMS to be an integrated platform with its mobile app. This allows the volunteers from all over the world can submit report with coordinates to server via Open GeoSMS (without the access to mobile internet), it also allows server to dispatch task to volunteers via Open GeoSMS for specifying where to meet up or where the resources should be moved to. It’s handy while the data access is not available.
The Fifth Element is Tzu-Chi
The Video that linked with the picture above is about how Tzu-Chi Foundation worked and helped in Japan for 311 tsunami. Tzu-Chi was one of the dozen relief NGO that got accepted to enter Japan when the disaster happened.Tzu-Chi is a humanitarian organization based in Taiwan and has over one million volunteers all over the world. Strong task force team for disaster response can be quickly established by Tzu-Chi. The necessities could be soon sent to the the area in need. Most of the volunteers from outside don’t have data access to internet on their smart device, that’s why we propose our integrated solution and hope this tool can help Tzu-Chi on any following disaster response and management events. Tool itself can’t work, that’s why we talked to Tzu-Chi and make the humanitarian logistics channel the fifth element of this system. Tzu-Chi agrees that with those integrated open platforms, mobile applications, offline maps, and the location SMS, it will be very helpful for them to perform the disaster response abroad. This feedbacks really encourages us, we do GeoThings, and we are more than happy to do the GeoThings that has a lot to do with humanitarian support :-)
Here’s the power point slides of the talk we gave on May 16th, 2012, in NCDR conference about this five elements idea
Do It with Others, not Do It Yourself!
What we usually say is DIY, Do It Yourself. Today Noritsuna-san told us, Do It with Others! Nori-san demonstrated Auto Chasing Turtle and Treasure Hunting Robot today. Those two demos were not just amazed but also inspired the students of Yuan-Pei university with the idea “Together, you will go further”.
From the hardware point of view, Nori-san integrated the robots from Kondo, Kinect and Xction as depth & image sensor, BeagleBoard & Snowball as platform, and NeuroSky as brain wave analyzer. On the other hand, software is the most amazing part to me. Nori-san leverages Linaro kernel, using OpenNI and openFramework (for UI), plus NITE as the skeleton scanner, and some Android applications made by him. To run all those libraries and applications together, Nori-san boots the Linaro kernel first, launch Ubuntu for running NITE (it’s binary), then chroot to run Android for the applications he needed. Well, it hacks a little bit (or say, that hacks a lot, to me) and that’s what he want to address, DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL AGAIN!
There are lots of open source projects going on, many evaluation boards for you to “evaluate”, and many partners to be your virtually co-worker. If you want to learn some fundamental stuff, you may go through the path that people walked before, and think about if there’s something innovative or something new alone the path of learning. If you want to realize your idea and proof it to others, just leverage the resources that are already for you. We don’t need to develop the face recognition algorithm again, we don’t need to implement the skeleton scanner again, we use those open source projects, then we top our innovation on those infrastructures.
Take a look at the slides or the video, you can also feel how Nori-san walked his way and how he impacted others :-)
You may also watch Noritsuna’s Talk in OSDC April 14, 2012.
Of course, source code is a must ^^
slayer@GeoThings
It’s really great to have a discussion of in Ushahidi Community Meeting. We briefly introduce our current progress on the Ushahidi mobile app and the supports of server plug-ins on Open GeoSMS. We talked some practices that are based on Ushahidi such as Farmers’ Market, Charity Trading Platform, the SmartBizLead.com (a social enterprise project) in Nigeria, and our latest collaboration with Tzu-Chi in Taiwan.
Henry mentioned that it’s better to make the out-going Open GeoSMS option fits better to the app, not to choose how we gonna shoot the message (via internet or SMS) every time we send. GeoThings will have a further discussion with Henry on this Use case/flow design.
Dale pointed out that to support Open GeoSMS and let user to send SMS with iOS is making sense, and added an issue for tracking, Add (Open) GeoSMS Support. We of course will have further discussion on the use scenarios for a better support.
Another project that caught my eyes is OccupyMap. It’s Ushahidi based but allow users to tag stories, pictures, and videos to “location” (such as Time Square). Here’s the quick introduction on Ushahidi’s blog, Relaunching OccupyMap for May Day. Of course, here the source code on github.
During the meeting, it occurred to me that Google is also working on some disaster alert subscription called Google Public Alerts (source from NOAA i think), and it will be a plus if they can adapt Open GeoSMS as one of the notification format.
Very happy to be part of this discussion/meeting. Looking forward to having more fun with you guys, cheers!
slayer, GeoThings
Yes, we officially launched this Charity Trading Platform today! Just like we mentioned before, the root of technology should be the bottom of heart, we start this with the event of Tomato selling from two farmers, Mr. Huang and Mr. Lo. Because of the heavy rain around Hsinchu area last week, Mr. Huang’s tomatos are badly ruined and not even able to harvester. We don’t think this disaster will interrupt our will for this charity event, so we decide to make the reservation of Mr. Huang’s next coming tomatos around Oct. Mr. Lo’s Soy Bean Milk Tomatos are incubated in green house and able to deliver so we still accept limited orders.
We really appreciated the volunteers who help this event on shipping arrangement and payment things. All the profits will be donated to ChuHsin (新竹築心之家) or BlueSky (藍天家園). We also this alternative usage of Ushahidi project is quite interesting and can be innovative in various way, thanks to all the people who support this project! You are the one who make this real and meaningful, thank you!
寰宇廣播電台對 slayer@GeoThings 的採訪 (於 Apr 25th, 2012 分別在 11:00 以及 17:00 的時段播出), 其中提到 Open GeoSMS 的應用情境, 於防災的運用, 以及後續的展望. 當然, 我們還是要強調, Open GeoSMS 所衍生的服務非常的多, 但是最核心的目的是為了讓不同平台與應用之間可以互通位置資訊的一個開放規格 ^^
GeoThings
因為 GeoThings 的產品也包括日本市場, 今天和大家分享一個剛出爐沒多久的智慧型手機市佔率數據調查.
由 japan.internet.com 的這篇 スマホ所有率は23.6％、Android が iOS を逆転 整理來看 (數據是從日本 D2 Communications 的 スマートフォン普及動向調査 來的), 智慧型手機的擁有率從去年的7.6%到今年的23.6%, 也難怪日本美型又多功能還防水的智慧型手機一直出阿.
重點來了, iOS在智慧型手機的市佔率從去年的 57.7% 到今年下降到 39.6%, 大家接著也可以猜到 Android 以機海戰略一舉把市佔率從 29.1% 提升到 56.7%, 逆襲成功. Softbank (電信商) 當然也從原本在智慧型手機市場有 60.1% 的市佔率掉到 38.5%. NTT DoCoMo 和 AU (KDDI) 都大幅的開疆闢土阿.
雖然這只是 D2 Communication 有效樣本數 3000 人的調查, 不過也透露出智慧型手機在日本的成長力道. APP 的開發商可能不只要開發 iOS, 但是面對分裂多樣的 Android 平台, 開發 APP 的痛苦也是越來越大. 這次 Facebook App 採用 HTML5 技術或許是一個大家可以參考的方向, 但是缺乏 local cache 有時候又覺得 APP 使用起來不是那麼的方便. GeoThings 之前有提到 開放測試規格 的想法又是否會讓電信商與開發商欣然接受, 並且讓開發 APP 的個人/團隊可以專心在實現想法, 而不用常常面對使用者回報說「你的 APP 在我的 XX 平台上面沒辦法執行」這樣的問題? 這些問號, 可能都還要盤根錯節的交織好一陣子吧 (笑)
We are doing something about geospatial, open standard, open source, location-based services, and lots interesting things. So what are we doing? GeoThings :)
GeoThings launches Where2Meet on Android today!!
WhereToMeet is an app for you to quickly search restaurant, cafe, movie theater, all kinds of POIs using keywords, or even specify the place on map by yourself, then meet up with your friends there.
Going out with a group of friends, it’s quite annoying to contact one by one and tell them the location of the bar or pub that we are going to hang out. With WhereToMeet, just search with keyword and then you can tweet on your timeline with mentions of your friends, then it’s done! Direct message on twitter and SMS are supported too. You don’t need to spend 3 minutes to explain how to get there, just send out this location information and it’s done. You may see the use case of photos in this post, this example went through “keyword search”, “get result”, “send via twitter/SMS”, “received and display”.
Unlike other application that both you and your friends have to install the same app, WhereToMeet can send your meet up location via Twitter or SMS. Even a traditional Nokia phone can receive your location SMS without problem. Further, it works while you don’t have internet access, but can still send out your current location via SMS to your friend. It’s helpful while you are not familiar with the language or environment that you were.
WhereToMeet even compliant to OGC Open GeoSMS standard, it allows other applications and services to work with its out-going SMS. GeoThings is also working on Taxi calling and roadside assistance service exchange internationally. Sounds interesting?! Try WhereToMeet first!
GeoThings
GeoThings proudly announces the Open GeoSMS plugins for Ushahidi!!
With this Open GeoSMS plugin for Ushahidi, user may submit reports from their Android phone with Ushahidi app with Open GeoSMS (which is geo-tagged SMS). If you are interested in the use flow, please have a look to the photo gallery in this post.
To report event with Open GeoSMS is very useful while you were overseas for some disaster response or humanitarian support activity. Data connection is not that easy to have, but SMS works most of the time. With Android phone, Ushahidi app can work without data connection, then get the coordinate from GPS for the geo-tagging of an event, which you would like to report. After GPS located your position and you complete the description of this event, send it via Open GeoSMS through SMS mechanism. Ushahidi server then can quickly understand the location of your report, popping it up on the presentation layer with map automatically.
We have tested Open GeoSMS plugin with FrontlineSMS and SMSSync plugin of Ushahidi, the source code should be up-streamed very soon. We are GeoThings from Taiwan and we are very happy to contribute our ability for humanitarian supports, and very happy to co-work with Ushahidi team. This is just the beginning and there will be some more interesting things that we will announce later. Cheers!!
GeoThings
