still pretty tech-lite. So a group of civilian aid workers, Pakistani and international, have home-brewed a series of social media apps to help coordinate relief work — everything from crisis Wikis to crowd-sourced maps to SMS calls for help.

U.S. forces in Pakistan have a few Web 2.0 tools of their own. But there’s a serious digital divide between the military and civilian tools. The armed forces’ efforts are pretty rudimentary, in comparison. They haven’t yet plugged in these independent Wiki creators and collaborative mapmakers — and may never.

One of the biggest problems in flood relief is locating people displaced by the flood who need food, shelter or medicine. So Sohaib Khan, a computer-science professor at the Lahore University of Management Scientists, put together a widget to help. Floodmaps relies on GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps to track the path of the flood and monitor devastation like washed-out bridges that need to be rebuilt. His maps page provides detailed views of over 9000 villages affected by the downpour, broken down by region.

The primary customer for Khan’s maps are non-governmental organizations at work in Pakistan. “Our goal is to get as much data out there as possible,” he says. “We are now working with other NGOs to help them with their mapping needs, both for the current phase as well as planning for the upcoming rehabilitation phase.” But it’s not just independent aid groups that have made use of Floodmaps. The Punjab government’s detailed flood-relief website runs Floodmaps on its mapping page.

Khan’s website makes it easy to get one of his widgets: just file a request through a provided form and receive a Floodmap. But that’s about as far as his efforts go in terms of social media. The maps themselves track data provided by affiliated aid groups about broken dams, damaged roads and other affected infrastructure. But those groups — or citizens themselves — can’t adjust the maps themselves. “We have not yet really exploited crowdsourcing,” Khan says.

That falls to a group called PakReport, an impromptu collection of Pakistani technologists and their mostly-American academic friends. PakReport is a donor-supported SMS effort that allows people affected by the flood to send in their location and a message about their need. Using a mapping tool called Ushahidi, flood-stricken Pakistanis can find their emergency information tracked by type and location, giving official and independent aid agencies access a view into the evolving landscape of people’s needs. Text to 3441 and help create a distributed database of crisis information.

Heather Blanchard is working on another. She’s a co-founder of CrisisCommons, a massively crowdsourced disaster-response volunteer effort started in 2009 that helped survivors and aid groups link up during the Haitian earthquake. (It even built a Creole-to-English mobile app.)  Already, CrisisCommons has a detailed Pakistan flood wiki going, and it’s put together 20-hour “CrisisCamp” BarCamps of civic-minded geeks that come up with new ways of pushing information on the crisis outward and helping aid groups respond.

“What we’re about is galvanizing the ‘crisis crowd,’” Blanchard says. “People see what’s happening and connect with each other on the internet.” Among those efforts: a CrisisCamp in Silicon Valley recently started looking into how “ham radio information can be transmitted into a Ushahidi map.”

The U.S. military is also trying to foster those kinds of connections. But some of the independent designers and aid workers interviewed for this piece say they haven’t even heard of the tools that the armed forces have in place.

For instance: HARMONIEweb, a web-based connection tool the military has possessed since 2006 and began using in August for the Pakistan flood. It’s an unclassified portal site for government and non-government civilian aid workers and the military to exchange flood information. There are lots of links to pretty much any organization involved in flood relief, and anyone interested in helping out can request a HARMONIEweb account. “Users are free to post their documents, announcements, calendar events, requests for assistance, and any other information they want to share,” says Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Pakistan. There’s an instant-messaging client and everything. (Unfortunately, the military’s Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan didn’t respond to my inquiries about how it used web tools and social media before the deadline on my first flood-relief post.)

But so far, HARMONIEweb doesn’t seem to be building a community. Its chat archive is empty, as is its documents folder. The video page contains, bizarrely, four short news segments from the pro-Putin news service Russia Today. Its Wiki presents Excel spreadsheets filled with stats from the Prime Minister’s office on aid that’s been delivered. Its “Knowledge Management Collaboration” section largely consists of photos of U.S. aid — and even the U.S. relief effort’s own icons. It’s hard to see how the material on HARMONIEweb helps plan future aid missions.

The Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan does have an All Partners Access Network set up for flood relief, complete with PDF maps of affected areas and fact sheets about the relief effort — much like U.S. Southern Command set up for the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake earlier this year. But Ryder says that HARMONIEWeb is “our main effort” for online relief tools. And so far, HARMONIEweb doesn’t have the highest profile in the Pakistan aid community: Khan said he “was not aware of HARMONIEWeb” and emailed that he would “look into it.” Blanchard said her group wasn’t using it, either, despite CrisisCommons working with the military in Haiti.

That’s not to say the U.S. military isn’t helping Pakistan recover. To the contrary: it’s delivered millions of pounds of food; saved 12,000 Pakistanis from the flood waters; and just yesterday, sent two more Marine helicopters to a Sindh Province airbase, augmenting the 17 already in Pakistan. It’s clearly looking to friend aid groups. So far, though, those organizations appear to be relying on their own social-networking tools in Pakistan.

Credit: Floodmaps/Sohaib Khan

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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