When a PhD student at Tufts University couldn't verify if a loved one was alive after a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, a movement that would transform big data's relationship to humanitarian response was born.

Five years ago, rather than waste time worrying, Patrick Meier and a few colleagues got to work. They built a real-time crisis map using data collected via SMS and social media, as well as an open-source mapping program called Ushahidi (the word means "witness" in Swahili: The program was developed in Kenya to map incidences of violence following the disputed 2007 election).

Within weeks, hundreds of volunteers around the world joined in to add locations of emergencies, infrastructure damage and immediate threats, and FEMA's top administrator had tweeted that it represented the most comprehensive picture of the situation on the ground.

The digital humanitarian movement had begun.

Meier, now director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), has chronicled the rise of the volunteer-driven movement in a new book called The Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response.

"There are all kinds of bad examples of technology," Meier told Mashable in a phone interview from Cape Town, South Africa, citing the spying, harassment and privacy issues that dominate the big-data conversation. "This is a completely different narrative. People want to help and they volunteer hours, if not days, of their time, night and day, all around the world to help people they'll never meet."

What happened in Haiti

A week into the disaster, the Digicel telecommunications company in Haiti set up an SMS number that was free for Haitians to use to signal their locations and urgent needs to the crisis mappers. Since most of these messages were written in Haitian Creole (known as Kreyòl in Haiti), the group connected with the Haitian diaspora via various Facebook groups and Haitian television and radio stations; they asked for help translating the messages via a custom website.

The result: a crowdsourced translation of tens of thousands of text messages. Some 1,000 Kreyòl-speaking volunteers from more than 41 countries volunteered their translation skills, according to Meier. That, in turn, led to a 10-minute turnaround time from text message to English translation, ready to be mapped.

"My name is [removed for privacy] I'm not dead," read one such message quoted in the book. "I am under the rubbles in University Caraibes, which is in [address removed]. Please come and get me!"

People run in the streets after an earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010. Image: Cris Bierrenbach/Associated Press

Three weeks after the earthquake, volunteers had mapped 2,500 reports on the crowdsourced, interactive crisis map, Meier wrote in his book. The map quickly became a valuable search-and-rescue resource for U.S. Marine Corps' operations, the U.S. Coast Guard and search and rescue team, and others, according to representatives quoted in it.

Based on Meier's account of a phone call his team received from FEMA's Task Force 3 in Port-au-Prince, an unnamed official said, "Whatever anyone tells you, don't stop mapping."

Back-to-back typhoons in the Philippines

Since mobilizing in Haiti, the digital humanitarians, whom Meier refers to with the hashtag #DigitalJedis on Twitter, have spread their efforts to a range of geographic locations and crises, from Libya to Chile.

The United Nations has cofounded the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN), which "has since become the official interface for traditional humanitarian organizations to interact with growing networks of tech-savvy digital volunteers from all around the world," Meier said.

Implementing high-tech yet user-friendly solutions, the network and its partners (Translators Without Borders and OpenStreetMap, for example) help humanitarian organizations make sense of the flood of data that results from a crisis, which can pose a challenge for more traditional groups.

During Typhoon Haiyan, which thrashed the Philippines in 2013, the U.N. activated the DHN to help identify and map damage via images and messages posted to Twitter.

Using the open source MicroMappers program developed by QCRI and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, volunteers rated and tagged tweets and images based on location, infrastructure damage, urgent need or population displacement. According to Meier's book, volunteers sent 300,000 clicks or "votes" to categorize the distress calls in just 72 hours.

An example of an image in need of categorization via MicroMappers Image: MicroMappers.org

By the time Typhoon Hagupit hit the island nation the following year, Meier's team at QCRI had developed an AI engine, called Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR), which is also free, open source and customizable. Implemented alongside the MicroMappers program, AIDR learns from volunteers' actions, reading and classifying tweets on a large scale, "up to about 2 million per hour," Meier said.

The crisis map from Typhoon Hagupit Image: MicroMappers.org

When deployed in this way, "technology is not dehumanizing," Meier said. It represents a "harmonious relationship between human and machine," which shows "both as part of the answer," he added.

Wildlife conservation, Ebola response and beyond

The Digital Humanitarian Network continues to expand its work, currently identifying potential relief opportunities via microsatellites, UAVs, the sharing economy and even the online gaming community, all of which are detailed in Meier's book.

It will also continue to experiment with applications outside of natural disaster response. Volunteers analyzed tens of thousands of aerial images of a wildlife reserve in Namibia, for example, to tag fauna, in an effort to help officials curb poaching.

These digital Jedi also volunteered their time mapping the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Using satellite imagery, digital content online and information from aid workers, volunteers identified clinics, patient capacities, roads, cell towers and more, in remote parts of the worst affected nations, providing detailed infrastructure information to organizations on the ground.

As Meier described it, moving beyond the requisite $10 donation to a relief organization during a disaster, the digital humanitarians make it possible for volunteers to make a difference with technology at their fingertips and 10 minutes of their time.

"People want to be part of the solution," he said, adding that the networks offer that chance. "Forget crowdsourcing. We're talking about planet sourcing."