As recently mentioned by Nick, he has been contacted by a BBC journalist who was researching developments in social media around the Typhoon in the Philippines. They made this film in response
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24993953
MicroMappers (http://micromappers.com/) have produced a number of crowdsourcing apps to help categorise tweets. They call their apps ‘Clickers’, for example TweetClicker is an application in which users select a fitting (pre-defined) category for a (text) tweet. Of note is that they work in partnership with UN OCHA, which means the crowd-filtered information has potential to actually be used in the response on the ground.
Behind MicroMappers is a team around Patrick Meier (former Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi). More information on the project and the team here:
http://irevolution.net/tag/micromappers/
Of more general relevance to ORCHID, there is also a really interesting recent article on Wired http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/30/digital-humanitarianism (September 30), that talks about this project: AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) from the self-same group around Patrick Meier at the Qatar Computing Research Institute http://irevolution.net/2013/10/01/aidr-artificial-intelligence-for-disaster-response/.