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The following post is by Lukas Biewald, originally published on CrowdFlower's blog and reposted with his permission.  Lukas is the founder and CEO of Dolores Labs and CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing technology and resource.

Image source: Ushahidi

Friday night I was getting ready to spend the weekend working on my board meeting slides when my friend Ian Monroe came by the office and told me to talk to Robert Munro. Robert is a computational linguist who does research on large scale processing of text messages — an obscure subject until the earthquake in Haiti happened two weeks ago.Robert had been working with Josh Nesbit, cofounder of FrontLineSMS:Medic, an awesome NGO dedicated to building SMS based communication infrastructure for people in the developing world.