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A TechCrunch piece by Lukas Biewald and Leila Janah, ‘Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief’, on Mission 4636, the text-message hotline set up after Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake. Built by Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource with support from the US State Department, and promoted by Haitian radio stations, it received more than 40,000 messages in its first month, most of them in Haitian Creole. Volunteers in the Haitian diaspora translated them online for free, and Samasource trained 50 workers in Mirebalais to translate many more. The authors say the system cost less than $500,000 to build and run.

