Partners

Cynthia Chen, Director, University of Washington ThinkLab

Kurtis Heimerl, Assistant Professor, UW Computer Science and Engineering

Dan Abramson, Associate Professor, UW Urban Design and Planning

Esther Jang, Postdoctoral Scholar, UW Computer Science and Engineering

Ridley LeDoux, UW Human Centered Design and Engineering

SSEC Engineers

Don Setiawan, Senior Research Software Enginner

Niki Burggraf, Senior Research Software Engineer

Natural disasters often isolate communities, leaving them to fend for themselves in the aftermath. In Seattle, for example, neighborhoods have been told to be on their own for at least 2-3 weeks after an event. In this absence of centralized aid, current disaster response strategies ignore the untapped physical and social capacity within communities to drive their own efforts. 
 
SSEC is working with a team from the University of Washington’s THINKLab to design and build a peer-to-peer application for place-based decentralized information and resource sharing in disaster response. These networks will empower neighborhoods in response, allowing for collective action that drives a greater resilience. Furthermore, the app will enable the ThinkLab to enumerate experiments on community readiness, providing a valuable tool for learning from diverse populations through a centralized resource. 

The resulting application will be open-source, with differing roles within community groups, leveraging a Flutter frontend and Supabase backend. The cloud deployment will be done using OpenTofu in Amazon Web Services. 

The project fills a big gap both in the government disaster response effort and in science: how to leverage community-based physical and social capital for effective information and resource sharing. The system will be used by different groups of people: community members, cluster captains (each cluster is about 2-3 blocks in a community, about 20 households), community organizations, and city emergency responders.