When disaster struck Haiti over a week ago people came together in many different ways to help. Many people have traveled there to aid in the rescue and relief efforts going on. Others have donated money to the Red Cross or some other organization with people on the ground in Haiti. But another group of people are finding ways to use their internet savvy skills to aid in the relief effort from their offices in the states.
According to ABC News,
Tim Schwartz, a 28-year-old artist and programmer in San Diego, feared upon learning of the disaster that, with an array of social-networking sites active, crucial information about Haitian quake victims would “go everywhere on the Internet and it would be very hard to actually find people — and get back to their loved ones,” he said. So Schwartz quickly e-mailed “all the developers I’d ever worked with.”
In a few hours, he and 10 others had built http://www.haitianquake.com, an online lost-and-found to help Haitians in and out of the country locate missing relatives.
I know that in the past news organizations have setup hot-lines and websites to track missing people after a disaster, but never before have I heard of a group of developers just coming together to help in a massive way like this.
I think this type of action is a trend we’re seeing lately with how the internet has evolved. I want to point back to a quote from… of all people… Ashton Kutcher on that day back in April 2009 when he beat CNN to 1 million twitter followers.
Look! At the end of the day what’s this about? It’s about the changing of the guard… from the old way of consuming media to the new way of consuming media. We, together, can decide. We can make the news on our cell phones… on our iPhones, on our cameras, on our video cameras. We can edit the news, we can broadcast the news and we can consume the news. We can decide what news we want to hear, how we want to hear it, when we want to hear it… and we can get it faster on the web. That’s all we’re sayin’. And it’s not about me and it’s not about any acolade that I’m tryin’ to achieve. It’s really about us and a statement that one man can have a voice that is as loud as and entire media company. And you can have that voice as well… and we can all have that voice together… and we can change media forever.
- Ashton Kutcher
I think media has changed forever. In a good way. As I said… he was talking about getting 1 million twitter followers. But he was also talking about something bigger than him. He’s talking about Tim Schwartz and his 10 friends who got together and built a website to help people find information about their loved ones in Haiti.
Good One Internet!
