This proof of concept allows you to hook a cell phone to your computer and use it as a central ‘station’ for receiving and responding to SMS using a map as the main interaction tool. It was used in Golden Shadow to allow community responders report incidents from different neighborhoods. In this scenario, a community volunteer sent messages to the command center with a location specified as lat/long or an address in the message. This would pop on a map at the command center where a designated operator would triage and reply to those messages. As the day progressed we ‘tracked’ specific users, kept track of the conversation threads, and visualized which areas don’t have enough coverage.

Key requirements:

• Receive messages from any phone and place them on a map on the operator’s desktop,
• Accept position data entered as latitude/longitude or addresses,
• Allow the operator to reply, showing the threads as a conversation,
• Allow the operator to maintain a simple address book associating numbers with titles,
• If the operator is online, upload the information to a website for others to see,
• Expose the information using standards such as GeoRSS,
• Allow people to visualize the information in common consumer mapping solutions.

This project takes advantage of the following technologies:

• RSS and GeoRSS as the standard data representation on the wire,
• Google Earth as the local interactive mapping application,
• A simple local web application that gets opened to ‘reply’ to the messages built with ASP.NET,
• Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps as free online mapping applications,
• Google Maps geocoding web services to translate addresses into positions,
• Microsoft Research SMS Toolkit to receive messages and send responses hooked up to an HTC phone,
• An ASP.NET web application to host the information online and display it using multiple mapping solutions.

Current Status:

The quality of this is at a level that could be used for proof-of-concepts, but QA needs to be done to use it in a mission critical environment.

There are no current active efforts around this project, but the experience of building it and using it in Golden Shadow taught us things we are applying in twitter bots and other efforts.

About InSTEDD:

As an independent, nonprofit organization, InSTEDD discovers, develops, evaluates, and distributes software and other technology-based tools to improve prediction, surveillance, preparedness, and response capabilities for those responding to global health threats, natural disasters, and human-caused emergencies. Visit our website at http://instedd.org.

Humanitarian aid workers:

At InSTEDD we are continuously looking for feedback. Would you like to help us shape our requirements and stories from a humanitarian aid perspective? please visit our forum at http://instedd.org/techforums.