A variety of events were organized around the US, including Washington DC, for volunteers to come together and create systems for NGOs to use. The initiative, called CrisisCamp, included a project to develop a base layer map for Port Au Prince that would post available imagery to share with the public for open source applications. The camps are also developing family locator systems to help crisis workers locate and reunite families divided by the quake. Volunteers will also manage a news aggregator to co-ordinate data feeds.
Other crisis camps were set up in New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Denver, and London. A crisis mapping group was set up on Google, and geospatial software firm ESRI also lent assistance.
The group effort is part of an ongoing attempt to marshal tech experts to help disaster-struck areas. The first Crisis Camp barcamp was held in Washington, DC in May 2009. Microsoft, Google, NASA and the World Bank were among the founders.
Conversely, the criminal community behaved with typical self-interest. Search engine results for earthquakes were poisoned to redirect to fake donation pages, and micro-blogging site Twitter was also used to distribute malicious URLs under the guide of an appeal for donations to quake victims. The SANS Institute also said that it was seeing a rise in parked domains with names relating to the Haiti disaster, and the FBI posted a fraud alert warning people not to accept spam emails soliciting donations.
The magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti - the western hemisphere's poorest country - happened on Tuesday, and is said to have affected a third of the its 9 million people.