Comments on: SMS for Disaster Relief /blog/sms-for-disaster-relief/ Survey & message hard-to-reach populations – at scale Fri, 09 Sep 2022 03:56:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 By: Jostas Mwebembezi /blog/sms-for-disaster-relief/#comment-62 Fri, 08 May 2015 17:24:00 +0000 http://engageSPARK.com/blog/?p=1382#comment-62 I am excited to learn about this
Your platform will help me face and end all preventable maternal deaths in Uganda, S.Sudan and Congo

]]> By: Floyd Piedad /blog/sms-for-disaster-relief/#comment-43 Fri, 10 Jan 2014 08:18:00 +0000 http://engageSPARK.com/blog/?p=1382#comment-43 Hi Sunny,
We hacked an SMS-based bulletin-board to enable typhoon victims to broadcast their call for help via SMS. This SMS is then stored in our server, posted on our website, and posted into Facebook and Twitter as well. You can see our 2-week work effort here: http://reliefboard.com. What was cool was that we built an API to allow other organisations to receive SMS posts which will get stored in the Reliefboard database and make it visible to all users of the system. The vision is to have all relief agencies use just one SMS messaging service, and then data mine all incoming messages and make it available to the public / relief organisations. Enable the community to provide relief as well.

We were not able to make an impact during the recent typhoon as we did not have the partnership with the relief organisations who could take ownership of the calls for help. Neither were we able to do on-the-ground promotions to let victims know about the service. Hopefully Reliefboard can be more useful if and when the next calamity comes to the country (hopefully not anytime soon).
This platform may be extended to other countries / geographies easily – we just need to partner with the local telcos for the inbound SMS gateways.

]]> By: Floyd Piedad /blog/sms-for-disaster-relief/#comment-115 Fri, 10 Jan 2014 08:18:00 +0000 http://engageSPARK.com/blog/?p=1382#comment-115 Hi Sunny,
We hacked an SMS-based bulletin-board to enable typhoon victims to broadcast their call for help via SMS. This SMS is then stored in our server, posted on our website, and posted into Facebook and Twitter as well. You can see our 2-week work effort here: http://reliefboard.com. What was cool was that we built an API to allow other organisations to receive SMS posts which will get stored in the Reliefboard database and make it visible to all users of the system. The vision is to have all relief agencies use just one SMS messaging service, and then data mine all incoming messages and make it available to the public / relief organisations. Enable the community to provide relief as well.

We were not able to make an impact during the recent typhoon as we did not have the partnership with the relief organisations who could take ownership of the calls for help. Neither were we able to do on-the-ground promotions to let victims know about the service. Hopefully Reliefboard can be more useful if and when the next calamity comes to the country (hopefully not anytime soon).
This platform may be extended to other countries / geographies easily – we just need to partner with the local telcos for the inbound SMS gateways.

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