Lukas Biewald discusses the crowdsourced relief efforts in Haiti:
The advantages of a flexible crowdsourcing workflow to managing disaster relief are huge. Businesses like crowdsourced work because they don't have to plan unknown work capacity in advance, and managing a crisis is an extreme version of this problem. There would be no practical way to have thousands of trained Kreyol speakers ready to handle emergency text messages, but through viral channels and a microtask framework it was possible to have thousands of people around the world doing mission-critical work within days.
Of note, FrontlineSMS: Medic is mentioned in the piece, which was co-founded by Stanford medical student Nadim Mahmud.
Previously: Using cell phones to save lives
