About the Author: Shadrock Roberts serves as GIS Senior Analyst at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Center for the Application of Geospatial Analysis for Development (GeoCenter).

This weekend, volunteers will virtually collaborate with USAID staff during the Agency’s first crowdsourcing effort. Volunteers will work online to review Agency data on specific USAID economic growth activities, and help code that data with geographic information to help the Agency map its impact. This type of public engagement builds upon new developments at the cross section of new technology and efforts to make aid data more transparent.

These new developments appeared during the 2010 Haiti where volunteer technical communities (VTC) that were empowered by Web 2.0 technologies to engage with the response effort. The World Bank noted that these VTC present a “fundamental shift” for disaster intervention that holds “great promise.” Though the… more »