MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – Regardless of where you are around the world, if you have some spare time and want to help the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) in its Philippine relief efforts after Typhoon Yolanda (international codename Haiyan), then MicroMappers needs your time and your mouse clicks.

MicroMappers is a crowdsourced initiative that lets users tag tweets and pictures made during disasters, which are then reported to the UNOCHA.

With proper tagging of tweets and pictures, the UN gets a better understanding of where to send help during a given disaster and what resources need to be brought in.

According to Patrick Meier, one of the developers of MicroMappers, “Every tweet will get tagged by 3 different volunteers (to ensure quality control) and those tweets that get identical tags will be shared with our UN colleagues in the Philippines.”

Meier was one of the speakers at the PH+Social Good Summit, held last September 21, where he discussed the problem surrounding big crisis data: sifting through the information to find actionable content. By combining machine computing to find information and human judgment to verify reports, initiatives like MicroMappers and Rappler’s Project Agos disaster mapping platform can aid in relief efforts by finding data that relief workers can act upon in times of crisis. 

As of 7 am London time (3 pm Philippine time), November 11, the MicroMappers site notes that it’s on its last stretch of tweets that require mapping. More information on MicroMappers is available on this blogpost.

Those who wish to help in the crowdsourced tweet tagging can go to the TweetClicker CrowdCrafting intiative to begin tagging tweets. There’s no need to make an account to help; just click on start contributing now on the page above, and follow the instructions that come after.

Watch Patrick Meier’s talk from the PH+Social Good Summit below:

– Rappler.com
 

Help the victims of Typhoon Yolanda (international codename: Haiyan). Visit Rappler’s list of ongoing relief operations in your area. Tell us about your relief and recovery initiatives, email move.ph@rappler.com or tweet us @moveph.

Visit rappler.com/typhoon-yolanda for the latest updates on Typhoon Yolanda.