Wired.com Launches Community to Assist in Haiti’s Reconstruction

'Haiti Rewired' leverages Wired’s tech audience to foster grassroots innovation.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Wired.com has launched a community site that harnesses its user base to track and assist in rebuilding Haiti's infrastructure. The site, built on the Ning platform, aims to foster communication and grassroots projects to supplement broader NGO efforts.

Haiti Rewired, launched in early February, isn’t intended to be a one-off traffic generator, and while it will be largely left to develop under its own steam, it has serious goals. “There’s been a lot of optimistic statements about the earthquake being an opportunity to fix the endemic problems of Haiti,” said Evan Hansen, Wired.com’s editor-in-chief. “We decided to see how this will really play out over the long haul.”

The community leverages Wired’s unique editorial angle and readership—how technology and other alternative sources of innovation can assist in the relief efforts. “We see ourselves as middleware, trying to attract people who are experts and give them a platform,” said Hansen.

Haiti Rewired has about 600 members. Traffic so far is not significant, but the site is non-commercial, and the goal is to grow the community into a hub that incubates quality, grassroots projects from NGOs or other folks who want to help with the reconstruction efforts—particularly those that can apply nimble, tech-based solutions.

Hansen cited such outfits as Architecture for Humanity, SOIL and Openstreetmap.org as some of the smaller organizations lending a hand. “We see ourselves as a bit of a bully pulpit for some of the larger relief organizations that are more siloed in their approach to innovation and try to get them exposed to groups that are more experimental,” said Hansen.

Indeed, Wired.com’s 10-12 million monthly uniques will help amplify the community’s efforts to break through what Hansen described as a comparatively legacy NGO structure. “Relief effort communication between organizations is not that great. And what we’re seeing around transient Web development, data accessibility and sharing and standardization is very core to what we cover. We see direct applications in things like NGO cooperation.”

So far, the community is already working on adapting a Peruvian document about earthquake-resistant housing. “It was created by an engineering group in Peru and vetted by Western engineers,” said Hansen. A group of 50 engineering community members are creating a “Construction Booklet” by translating and adapting the Peruvian engineering codes as well as other documents from Canada and other countries into Creole.

“This is definitely a side project,” said Hansen. “We hope to generate material we can put in our regular newsflow. Our idea is to get a group of volunteers who are committed and interested enough to talk amongst themselves and create these spontaneous products.”