Access to data

Access to open data

Some of the data has been evaluated as non-sensitive, and we share this openly with the world. The data is published by Figure Eight, which is the same company that we used to translate, map and categorize the messages in 2010. The company was called “CrowdFlower” at that time.

You can download this data at:
https://www.figure-eight.com/dataset/combined-disaster-response-data/

The data is in a format that should help with Machine Learning and other Data Science methods. For example, the Machine Translation teams at Microsoft and Google have used the data to make sure that English to Haitian Kreyòl translation is accurate for emergency and health related information.

We are happy to share that two programs are now using this data for good:

AI-4-All (http://ai-4-all.org/_ is using the data to teach under-represented people about AI, especially girls and people of color.

Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/) is using the data for a data science course that 1000s of people will take, and will learn how to process and analyze data in disasters.

We are grateful that people can analyze the experience that we had so that others can avoid this experience in the future. We ask that you treat the subjects of these messages with dignity and respect.

Data that is openly available

To decide which data to open source, we used two sources. We ran a survey of Haitians who took part in 4636 and asked them what they felt to be appropriate data to share and what was sensitive. We also took the best practices in data protection globally, using GDPR as the basis for definitions of personally identifying and sensitive data. Where the two did not line up, we took the most conservative option of the two, keeping more data private.

There was only one case where we decided to be more careful than the majority vote. The majority Haitians said that it was ok to remove sensitive information from the messages, but still share them with that information removed. However, enough people believed that the entire message should be omitted in this case, so we omitted all messages with sensitive data.

Access to sensitive data

The Mission 4636 text messages and a copy of the chat-log used to coordinate the initiative are available for researchers. It is a super-set of the open data.

The Mission 4636 messages are private messages sent from individuals to response efforts, so they are anonymized. The initiative was coordinated by an open ‘IRC’ online chat, but because of the sensitive nature of some of the content we consider the chat transcript to also be private.

With the exception of the open dataset above, all the messages, chat logs, and other material, including the content of this website, are Copyright Mission 4636 and cannot be reproduced without our permission. Having said that, we would like researchers to be able to learn from our experiences to better prepare for future disasters.

If you would like a copy of the data set that includes some more sensitive data, please sent an email to:

info@mission4636.org

And include the following information:

Principle Investigator

Name of Institution

Nature of the Study

Because of the sensitive nature of the data, and that we don’t have the resources to perform a review of all proposals ourselves, we are releasing the data to people who work at institutions that have IRB (Internal Review Board) approval. For people who are not at an institution that has an IRB or ethics review committee, we suggest hiring an independent review board.

Mission 4636 will rely mainly on whether your IRB board has approved the study when we decide to release a copy of the data, but we might ask to see their decision.

Anonymization criteria

We have anonymized the data, with thanks to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft Research and Stanford University. The sensitive messages are not the full data, and are stripped of the following:

  1. Names of individuals
  2. Phone numbers of individuals
  3. Other personally identifying information like titles (eg: ‘Mayor of Paris’).
  4. Missing Person Information (in accordance with Red Cross guidelines).
  5. All information regarding minors.

If you find any of this information in the data, please omit that entire message/exchange from your study and let us know at the email address above.

Other information about Mission 4636:

All other information about Mission 4636 is released under Creative Commons Attribution license, except where otherwise noted.

In other words, you may reproduce any information from this website and use it how you choose, provided that you attribute the source to Mission 4636:

Mission 4636 (http://www.mission4636.org)

Update, 2012: You can now also reference our report:

Munro, Robert, 2013. Crowdsourcing and Crisis Affected Community. Journal of Information Retreival, 16(2), Springer
http://www.mission4636.org/report/
(This is the preferred reference for academic papers.)

Exceptions to creative commons attribution license.

All private conversations about Mission 4636 are the copyright of their senders and cannot be reproduced or distributed without their permission. This includes emails, personal text messages, skype conversations (chat or phone), and IRC chat messages marked ‘\prvt’. We ask that people are respectful of communications that people made during a stressful period, knowing that many Mission 4636 members have lost friends and family.

Publishing information about Mission 4636

For any publication (research, media, blog, etc) we ask that authors respect the following criteria:

  1. Do not publish the names of people.
  2. Do not publish personal phone numbers.
  3. Do not publish information about minors.
  4. Do not publish street addresses.
  5. Make it clear Mission 4636 is a majority Haitian initiate.
  6. Refer to the collective effort as “Mission 4636”, not one of the constituent organizations.
  7. When highlighting the role of individual organizations, do not introduce a racial bias by ignoring 5 or 6 or otherwise.
  8. If you receive notice for having potentially broken one of these conditions, please remove all material from websites or other public-facing locations until the matter is resolved.
  9. If you believe that you do not need to follow our requests because of independent advice or counsel: please remove all material from websites, etc. until the matter is resolved (as in 8). These guidelines are to protect the dignity as well as the privacy of individuals. Email your advice/counsel to info@mission4636.org – we will review and publish this advice, and obtain our own legal advice at our expense (although donations to cover this cost are welcome).
  10. Maintain the dignity of the crisis-affected population. Beyond the specific criteria above, do not publish information that marginalizes or discredits the crisis-affected population’s contribution to the response efforts, or could cause emotional stress if reproduced.

Cease and Desist

Cease and Desist: For continued violations of all ten conditions, we ask that National Geographic and reporter Patrick Meier please cease publishing about Mission 4636 and remove all sensitive articles from their websites, especially those with the names and phone numbers of people identifying as school children. We ask National Geographic and reporter Patrick Meier to cease all further articles, presentations or other publicity about the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti.

We ask that all other people keep traffic to the National Geographic articles to a minimum. Do not link to their articles or share them in open media, as this will increase the people who can see the sensitive information that they have posted, including the phone numbers of school girls.

(Update, 2018): for continually refusing to remove the name and phone number of a Haitian child at risk of sexual abuse due to their housing situation, we now ask that people stop linking to any material about Patrick Meier. This includes allowing him to speak at conferences or other events that we result in more people seeing this sensitive data about the children that he has posted online.

We will lift this cease and desist whenNational Geographic and Meier remove the pages that contain the names and phone numbers of children. Meier is in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the laws of most countries. While Meier is no longer a reporter at National Geographic, they are still publishing this information in his name, so this cease and desist still also applies to them.

Thank you,

Mission 4636 team

 

March 2010 (updated October 2010, June 2012, June 2018)