Hurricane Sandy Communications crowdmap.

Hurricane Sandy brought along a need for another crowdsourced, Crisiscamp type effort to support & coordinate response work. After being plugged into the “VTC Coordination room” on Skype for the last 24 hours and tracking all the reports, initiatives while simultaneously following Twitter, Facebook I noticed that there was no central source for data on landline, cellphone and internet outages.

Having seen a lot of Crisismapping effort before I decided to take the initiative to put up a map where people could submit reports of network outages and recoveries so that they could be visualised. The easiest tool for this was Crowdmap, a hosted version on Ushahidi, which provided all the basics and which could easily be customised.

The map is now up at the following URL: https://sandycommsmap.crowdmap.com/ I will be updating it and curating reports together with a number of volunteers so if you want to support us by “donating” some time and/or skills please contact me via email.