Notes On The Watershed Post’s Implementation Of Ushahidi’s Crowdmap

Several days before Hurricane Sandy arrived in New York, our two-person staff at the Watershed Post began building our Hurricane Sandy page: www.watershedpost.com/sandy.

We had learned from experience during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 that early preparation and installation of web tools was indispensable in covering a disaster. During Irene, our live blog became the locus for disaster coverage about the Catskills nationwide. It attracted almost 100,000 reads in three weeks and was featured in media outlets like the New York Times and CNN.

This fall, we decided to use a Ushahidi’s hosted Crowdmap platform to organize our coverage of Sandy in the Catskills.

Here’s a list of what worked and what didn’t...