As part of the Visual Studio 2015 release event on July 20th, 2015 our newest project "allReady" was launched.

allReady is focused on increasing awareness, efficiency and impact of preparedness campaigns as they are delivered by humanitarian and disaster response organizations in local communities.  As preparedness and resiliency of a community increases, the potential for impactful disasters (both large and small) is greatly decreased.  The rule of thumb in the industry is that an hour or dollar spent before a disaster is worth 15-30 afterwards.

However preparedness activities, like ensuring working smoke detectors are in homes, are often not as visible or emotionally salient as saving children from a burning building - for example.  The goal of allReady - in part - is to grow awareness and engagement of communities and volunteers in preparedness campaigns to grow their impact and - aspirationally - "put disaster response out of business" through communities that are fully prepared and resilient to inevitable disasters.

To learn more about the need for allReady, the technologies, and how the app came together, please view our Project Page, the readme file on our GitHub repository and watch the In the Code video series.

The genesis for this application and the need it fulfills came from our team working with a number of members of community and humanitarian organizations including Jim McGowan of the American Red Cross who we would like to thank for supporting our efforts and the efforts of the teams at Microsoft as a subject matter expert, the provider of the aspiration to "put disaster response out of business" and a great collaborater in the early and often messy stages of starting a new application.

Lastly, we're thankful for Microsoft and their many engineering teams that came together to jumpstart the development of the project as part of the Visual Studio 2015 release event and then turn over the project to us so that it can be maintained and improved by the technical community at large and ultimately deployed in support of organizations delivering preparedness campaigns everywhere.  They have given the app a great start and strong delivery of a 'first sprint of many' that sets us and the community up to build the project going forward.

To stay up to date on the project or to sign up to contribute to allReady please fill out our quick sign up form.