Introduction

• Receive tweets and / or SMS messages from the public.
• Dispatch these to online workers to classify and geocode.
• Display on a map.

Background

During the Haiti earthquake of Jan 2010, people trapped in buildings sent SMS messages to a designated shortcode. These were classified, translated, and geocoded by online workers using ​Amazon's Mechanical Turk, then provided to emergency managers.

During the Kenya 2013 general election, citizens and trained election monitors reported election-related incidents via SMS and twitter. These were automatically entered into a map database, then vetted by online workers to remove spam and contact the sender for clarification, before making the information public. See: ​https://uchaguzi.co.ke/

During a Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in 2010, a variant of this project was implemented using a Sahana Eden as the back end and a custom web page (not automatically generated by Eden) as the front end. This was designed as a training game -- workers got "experience points" and were awarded badges.

Project breakdown

This project is intended to be easy to subdivide into tasks that can be worked on somewhat independently and in parallel, given the choice of a few naming conventions for new database tables and fields.