The last 24 hours has greatly solidified a movement and community that has been gaining steam for the last year or so – crisis mapping. Crisis or disaster mapping is a range of services/applications that are designed to help gather and spread information for and between first responders, NGOs, domestic and international governments and relief organizations- as well as most importantly the people affected by a crisis. Over the last year, a few startups and non-profits have sprung up around this concept (I’m also developing technology around this), although the majority of “crisis mappers” work for large companies such as Google, Yahoo and ESRI as well as national and multinational organizations such as FEMA, NASA, the UN and the World Bank. There have been a few conferences put together by members of the fledgling community, including Crisis Camp, Random Hacks of Kindness, and the ICCM conference. There has been interest from government and NGOs in how to tap into this community. But while there has been a general agreement that this community was all sailing on the same ocean, ships have been taking their own courses to the destination. That is, until a 7.0 earthquake hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince a little over 24 hours ago. Since then crisis mapping has started to put itself onto one current, and what is happening is nothing less than the real birth of a community for good.

Since the quake struck, crisis mappers have been working around the clock to help to provide incident report sites and sites that help people find missing family members. Today alone I spend four hours on conference calls and a few hours with a dozen or so other crisis mappers on EtherPad (which, if Google Wave can truly integrate would be amazing) discussing how we as crisis mappers can be most effective over the next few days and weeks. We decided that the best way to harness the groundswell of support for helping Haiti is to run a number of emergency Crisis Camp hackathons this Saturday around the country in order to:

1. Build a new base layer map of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas as existing maps are simply no longer applicable
2. Build a directory of technologists and their specialties that NGOs and government officials can use to find people to meet their technology needs
3. Work on a single depository of missing person information and a way to access that info for any developer that needs it

So why is this probably the tipping point for the crisis mapping community? There are many reasons. First of all, the world needs this, plain and simple. Secondly, the technologies are in line. Third, governments and NGOs are starting to realize that they need this (again, just starting). Fourth, there is enough participation of startup-minded folks that are really innovating in this space. Finally, the crisis in Haiti has affected us all, and – as we were with the Asian tsunami, Katrina and other recent disasters – we are truly humbled and simply want to use the force of our collected knowledge to lend a hand to those in need. Beyond the next few weeks where we will focus on Haiti, I can see that this community now has the resolve and momentum to carry on in a more cohesive direction and purpose, and hopefully at some point – and this is my sincere hope – we will be able to offer and implement solutions before disasters happen that will lessen the loss of life and property, instead of simply responding. While this isn’t the usual topic of our blog, we think that it’s an important part of the location sphere, and one that will increasingly be integrated into various existing social location services.