Crisis Mapping Japan's Earthquake and How You Can Help

Members of the Japanese OpenStreetMap community launched an Ushahidi platform for Japan just hours after the devastating earthquake struck the country. Less than 24 hours later, Japanese students at The Fletcher School in Boston (where the Ushahidi-Haiti project was run last year) mobilized to support the Tokyo-based crisis mapping project. Today, almost 3,000 individual reports have been mapped on the platform. We are shocked by the incredible devastation that the earthquake and tsunami have caused. Like everyone else, we want to find a way to help. So we reached out to our Japanese colleagues in Tokyo and they did have some specific requests for help. They would like to have the following Ushahidi guides translated from English to Japanese as quickly as possible:

Verification Guide

User Interface section of Ushahidi Manual

Admin Section of the Ushahidi Manual

We've created links to Google Doc versions of these documents to facilitate translation via crowdsourcing. If you speak Japanese, we'd be most grateful for your help. Simply provide the translated version in the designated document. These 3 guides above are the priority items right now. Other documents are listed on this link. Once we complete that we can undertake translation of the actual platform, to help with that, please request an account on our translation platform Tafsiri, be sure to select the Japanese language on the list. We will continue to touch base with our Japanese colleagues to know how else we might be able to support their efforts. As someone on Twitter recently said, "Today we are all Japanese". Other ways to help: Please refer to this page on Architecture for Humanity. People we are following on twitter: Joi Ito of Creative Commons @joi and Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times @hirokotabuchi; The Open Street Map Japan wiki is a good source of information, and the Google.org page.