Today techies across the U.S. and in the U.K. are joined together in a collaborative effort to develop tools and technologies that will be of use to responders and victims of the Haiti earthquake disaster. Volunteers with tech skills ranging from programming, natural language processing, and mapping (among just a few) are working on various projects that have the potential to connect people to vital information resources and speed rescue and recovery efforts.

Teams are gathered in London, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, Denver, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.

Representing the "non-techie side," I'm observing the bustling activities of the two teams working here in Denver. One group is collaborating on a project called "Tweak the Tweets," a project identified during the Random Hacks of Kindness and driven by researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder . A second is considering tasks of translating tags being used to filter information on flickr, delicious, and blogs in English into French Creole. A host of projects are being developed in the other five sites.

You can follow the activities of the Crisis Camps on Twitter @crisiscamp, or by observing twitter hashtags #cchaiti, #ccla, and #ccden.

This emergent network of disaster hackers comes on the heels of several crisiscamps launched in the past year. Led from within, no organization is leading and yet this self-organized group of creative and concerned global citizens is reaching out to assist in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is yet another example of an emergent group that has identified a set of unmet needs and altruistically gather together to address them using their various skill-sets.