HUMANITARIAN TOOLBOX BEGINS TESTING OF CRISIS CHECKIN APPLICATION

Volunteer developers build an application to help disaster relief professionals save lives

March 13, 2014 – Seattle, WA -- Humanitarian Toolbox today announced that one of its applications, the Crisis Checkin Application, is ready for beta test with disaster relief professionals.

The Crisis CheckIn Application is a system for automatically keeping track of who is responding to a particular emergency and automatically creating a "contact list"/"phone book" of those that are there. The service provides the location of the responder as well as their particular skillset. The Crisis CheckIn Application was inspired by Andrej Verity, seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypA9Iza5OFg.

Development of the Crisis CheckIn Application took place at hackathons across the US and Canada, occasionally in conjunction with other conferences, including DevIntersection, ThatConference and StarWest. While the requirements were provided by disaster relief professionals like Andrej Verity, the service itself is built entirely by volunteers.

“The energy of hackathons is palpable,” said Bill Wagner, president of Humanitarian Toolbox and leader of the Crisis CheckIn Service project. “Developers and testers are really excited to be part of a project that can save lives. Even when the hackathon is over, the volunteers participate on their own time, continuing to add and test code from home. That’s the power of an open source project – the contributions continue all year round.”

The Humanitarian Toolbox, an ongoing collaboration of volunteers with technology expertise, has leveraged the best of commercial software development methodologies to combine open source and crowd source development with a single goal: to deliver technology solutions for use in disaster response. The HTBox connects generosity and skills to the needs of response organizations to build and maintain rapidly deployable open source solutions and tools for disaster response – at no cost.