MH370: Pulling in the power of the people

We are now on Day 5 into the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. While officials have been keeping us informed of the progress of the search and rescue operation, I believe most of us; particularly the families and relatives of the passengers and crew members on board MH370 are getting anxious over the lack of information on the exact location of the missing aircraft.

So what can we do to help?

As the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 continues, a Longmont, Colorado company, Digital Globe announced a crowdsourcing platform on March 10, 2014 for everyone across the globe to help in the search for the missing Boeing 777 aircraft by combing through satellite images for clues on its whereabouts.

Two of its commercial satellites have already collected images comprising roughly 3,200 square kilometres at the confluence of the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. The company is continously updating the images to reflect new information on the search area provided by the Malaysian government.

Volunteers can help search through the images and tag objects of interest via Tomnod.com, DigitalGlobe’s crowdsourcing arm made available for free to the public. The campaign had been deployed through DigitalGlobe’s emergency management service, FirstLook, and has attracted a huge amount of interest.

Upon hearing about Tomnod, I made several attempts to access the site on March 11.

Instruction explaining what you can do on Tomnod

However the site was not responding to my request (sign up and loading of map). Several reports on international media and technology blogs later confirmed my suspicion: The overwhelming response to DigitalGlobe's call has crashed the site – this shows that people are concerned and they are willing to help.

Quoting a response by the Media Relations executive to my query via e-mail, there were an unprecedented level of web traffic and interest in supporting the search since its launch on Monday.

“We have new imagery collections planned for today and hope to make those images available online for the crowd as soon as possible.”

Part of the imagery of the ocean

According to a report on ABC News, DigitalGlobe launched a similar crowdsourcing campaign in November after Typhoon Haiyan. The company says users placed more than 400,000 tags, identifying 38,000 damaged buildings and 101,000 damaged homes.

UPDATE: Tomnod.com is now back online. I just started my search of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 via Tomnod and has explored 105 map tiles by the time I finished writing this article.