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The Invisible Children is a remarkable organization that “uses film, creativity and social action to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Koney’s rebel war and restore LRA-affected communities in central Africa to peace and prosperity.”
There latest project is absolutely awe inspiring:
LRA Crisis Tracker
The LRA Crisis Tracker is absolutely phenomenal!
It’s an advanced integration and application of multiple technologies weaved into a single tool that can be accessed throughout the world:
The LRA Crisis Tracker is a real-time mapping platform and data collection system created to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Using information sourced from Invisible Children’s Early Warning Radio Network, UN agencies, and local NGOs, this tool allows for better response from governments, policy-makers, and humanitarian organizations.This joint project, developed by Invisible Children and Resolve, marks the first time data surrounding the crisis has been comprehensively aggregated and made publicly available.
Here’s the LRA Crisis Tracker in action:
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The LRA conflict has been going on for over twenty years and hopefully this kind of technology will be no match for the LRA. This is an amazing application of technology.
The LRA Crisis Tracker gets peoples’ attention, increases understanding surrounding the problem and is a huge help in overcoming the communication challenges faced on the ground in Africa.
This new project has increased the number of LRA attacks reported publicly by over 600%!
As for the technology behind it,
the map runs on a custom-designed platform by Digitaria that uses, of all things, a Salesforce backend. Salesforce normally provides cloud-based sales and marketing record keeping services for online businesses; in this case, the LRA Crisis Tracker team created a custom CMS that delivers the information into both the mapping system and the app.
The first time I visited the LRA Crisis Tracker, I was amazing and astonished. Seeing such atrocities play-out in real-time was incredibly profound and left a very deep impression.
After digging further into the project and learning a little bit about the nuts and bolts behind it, I was absolutely amazed.
A job well done!
Take a look at the LRA Crisis Tracker, it’s EPIC.
[via Fast Company & LRA Crisis Tracker]
Jonathan says
Glad you liked it!
In case you are curious, the site was built using Drupal 7 and the base map was built using TileMill. http://mapbox.com/tilemill/
I’m definitely finding that both are a lot of fun to work with.
Eric Dye says
That’s awesome. Thanks for the inside scoop, man!