InSTEDD GeoChat

GeoChat
 
How to get everyone on the same page, and keep them there?
 
When a major humanitarian crisis occurs, every second matters for the affected community. People may be trapped, injured, or sick, and the longer it takes responders to reach them, the poorer the outcome is likely to be. What is needed is a response that is agile, efficient, and effective, where diverse groups – NGOs, the UN, national governments, military, and the local community – self-organize temporarily into a coherent, coordinated whole to provide assistance to a population in need.   Unfortunately, more often than not, coordination among relief organizations today is far from adequate. Responders in the field find it difficult to keep one another in the loop about what they are doing and where. They have a constant sense that they out of touch with headquarters, and headquarters with them.  Often, they lack adequate means to engage members of the local community and ensure that they participate meaningfully in the response. When key contacts are excluded from the process, they are left with an incomplete understanding of what is needed, and they cannot act as one. Delays mount up, too little arrives too late, and the cost may be measured in human lives.
 
There are many factors that may contribute to this lack of coordination, but to a great degree, much of it comes down to a single problem: reliable team-based communication during and after a crisis is critical to success, yet remarkably difficult to achieve. Effective humanitarian action is like a team sport, where scoring a goal depends on everyone’s understanding the plan and communicating well enough to improvise when plans change. In a crisis, responders must first establish reliable cross-organizational flows of information that include everyone with a role to play, and then interact regularly with one another to maintain a shared understanding of current plans, new developments, and who is doing what where. Yet as dozens, or even hundreds, of relief organizations mobilize teams to respond, arrive on site, and join forces to coordinate relief efforts, they often find that the technologies they use to communicate internally – computers, telephones, and radios -- do not allow them to communicate effectively with all of their new teammates. Inevitably, someone is left out of the circle of communication and, at a critical moment, fails to anticipate when it is their turn to act. 
 
Make sure everyone can participate, with any device, over any network
 
It is widely recognized that communication in post-crisis environments is difficult. Communications infrastructure may not be adequate, relief workers are hot, tired, and scared, and everyone arrives with whatever tools they happen to have. What is not as widely recognized is that the user of a team-based communication tool is not an individual, but a group.  Either everyone can participate in conversation, or the tool has failed to meet the need– it’s all or none.  If key team members are excluded, the rest of team may be left with a tough choice: try to make it work without them, or revert to inefficient, non-technical approaches such as daily face-to-face meetings.  Unfortunately, it’s a choice they face often, from one crisis to the next.  The latest web-based collaboration tool only works if all team members have access to computers and the Internet.  Field radios are useful for team coordination, but only if 1) everyone on the team has a radio, 2) everyone stays in range, and 3) all of the radios can interoperate. Phone-based conference calls are expensive, and during the response phase, telephony networks may be damaged or so overloaded by those attempting to reach loved ones that it’s difficult to place a call. Whether for lack of Internet access, hardware, cost, interoperability, or network capacity, crisis communications technologies in use today often fail to   meet the needs of the team by failing to include one or more members in the flow of critical information.
 
 
GeoChat:  Emergent Group Communication at the Edge of the Network
 
GeoChat is a flexible open source group communications technology that lets team members interact to maintain shared geospatial awareness of who is doing what where -- over any device, on any platform, over any network. GeoChat allows you and your team to stay in touch one another in a variety of ways: over SMS, over email, and on the surface of a map in a web browser.   Whether you are sitting at a computer with a high-speed Internet connection, or on the go with your mobile phone, GeoChat let you react to events on the ground with maximum agility, forming cross-organizational virtual teams on the fly, linking field to headquarters, and keeping everyone on your team connected, in sync, and aware of who is doing what, and where.
 
 
How GeoChat Works:
  • Register with GeoChat either online, by email, or by SMS
  • Create a new GeoChat group and invite your friends
  • Send messages to one another, or share them with the entire group.
  • If you’re mobile using your cell phone, prefix a text message with your location -- say your current address, or a latitude and longitude from a GPS - and GeoChat will place your icon on the map for online users to see. 
  • If you’re online in the browser, select a teammate’s icon on the map, click reply, and send a reply back to them over SMS.
Features: 
  • Create, join and participate in chat groups by SMS, email, or web browser.
  • Translates location names sent by users to a position on a map
  • Supports a variety of explicit location formats, as well as other user-defined tags.
  • Subscribe a group to one or more RSS/ATOM feeds, and each new item will be broadcast to mobile users via SMS.
  • Groups may be set as public or private.
  • GeoChat Server is available both as a free download and as a hosted service.
  • Twitter access via “geochat”, and domestic US gateway service via 44911.
  • Dedicated international SMS gateway supported by 96% of the world’s mobile carriers.  
  • Optional “local gateway” mini-client that allows you to plug a local cell phone into your laptop, connect to the Internet, and allow users to send and receive text messages through the service via the local cell network, rather than using the international gateway.
Benefits:
  • Let’s you see, at a glance, who said what, when, and where.
  • Allows geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data on your map.
  • Allows mobile users to verify, refute, or update information live from the field
  • Allows highly-connected users to share the benefits of their geospatial “big picture” view and push out relevant RSS/ATOMfeeds to a barely connected users via SMS.
  • Ensure that your teammates know where you are and what you are doing.
  • Visualize your remote team on the surface of a map and interact with them.
  • Works on any PC, Mac, or Linux PC capable of running Mozilla Firefox
  • Works using any cell phone capable of sending and receiving SMS messages.

 For Developers:
  • Source is available under the GPLv3 license.

 GeoChat Infrastructure

Current Status: 

GeoChat is in Beta  Contact info@instedd.org if you are interested in participating. (Participating in the beta means you get a little bit more suppport from our team)

GeoChat is in use for rapid response teams in Thailand and Cambodia, spanning provincial to sub-district health officers and volunteers.