From December 4 -10, 2014, Humanity Road’s virtual volunteer team was engaged in an online disaster response for Typhoon Hagupit (Ruby). The typhoon, initially classified as a Category 5 super typhoon on December 3, made landfall on December 6 in Eastern Samar, which is a province of the...

Guest Post by Robin Reid, Design Student from NYU - After Hurricane Sandy hit New York, we were amazed by the work that was being done on the ground by so many relief organizations to help the residents of our city. As design students, we were taking creative ways that relief volunteers and...

Hurricane Sandy and Disaster Networks – Key Observations, Good Practices and Challenges

by: Leonard Olyott & Keeve Brine, In an increasingly connected world, the ability of the members of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) to respond rapidly from anywhere in the world to offer assistance to disaster events is growing rapidly and becoming more coordinated and focused....

After forming in the Pacific Ocean on March 6, 2015, Cyclone Pam left a path of destruction across the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu before making landfall in Vanuatu on March 13 as a Category 5 storm. All of the island nations affected suffered serious damage to infrastructure,...

When Sandy made landfall in New York and along the New Jersey shoreline, the storm itself had already devastated islands in the Caribbean and moved along the eastern seaboard causing damage in coastal states along the way. In a much similar manner, the tweet stream about the storm ebbed and...

Humanity Road’s (HR’s) overall disaster response activities began on April 25th and ended on June 12th. In addition to producing general daily situation reports and conducting social media monitoring and amplification, HR was activated for five mission-specific projects.

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Many people ask “Why don’t they leave and find shelter”, today we are walking the path of the residents of Rockaway. This isn’t an attempt to judge, or criticize any system or tool, as we work with every one of these great groups. The Rockaways residents refer to the situation best when they...

When is silence a cry for help? Sometimes the absence of information emerging in a disaster is a cry for help. Modern social media data mining tools have been advancing their capabilities in order to find the signal in the noise of social media. But sometimes, the very absence of noise is a cry...