For the first time ever, engineers from around the world, including 131 organizations from 23 countries, cooperated online and assessed the damage situation following Haiti’s earthquake disaster. They tagged 10,797 heavily damaged and collapsed buildings. In fact, public viewing of satellite imagery through Microsoft’s Virtual Earth product tagged 4,391 buildings in one day. (Engineering News-Record, 2/15/10)
The social networking of engineers and organizations could be useful in accessing engineering talent globally, much the way “solution sites” such as Innocentive access global scientists for specific challenges. Although tagging and describing destroyed structures may be rather simplistic, increasingly sophisticated engineering work will be available on a remote basis.
Charles Hess
