Kim Stephens has an interesting blog post on four themes that emerged out of the Twitter updates on the International Conference of Crisis Mappers held from 1 – 3 October 2010 in Boston.
- Response organizations in Haiti mostly had to rely on low-tech solutions for mapping since the country had little technology infrastructure.
- Finding information about the affected area was sometimes easier to gather from those not in the impacted zone (e.g. , those in the Diaspora), although getting that information into the hands of responders in the field was a challenge.
- The crisis mapping community can add value to the response community, but processes to do so need to be established.
- Affected populations or nations can and should be empowered to help themselves.
Kim fleshes out these themes in detail here.