Can you and your family take care of yourselves for two weeks after a natural disaster?

At Humanitarian Toolbox, we've focused on helping developers contribute to projects that can help people be ready when disaster strikes. For the past few months, we've been working closely with the disaster preparedness folks at the Washington State Emergency Management Division to build an application to help families and communities prepare to be Two Weeks Ready.

The goal of Two Weeks Ready is to utilize smartphones and cloud technology to help your family get prepared for disaster by organizing the information your family will need when disaster strikes.

The first steps are preparedness, that is, having lists of what you'll need for your family to survive. The smartphone application will maintain lists of what you need and what you have, manage the expiration dates of consumables, and in general, make it easier for you to put together survival kits for you and your family.

Beyond the preparedness kits, there's also key information your family will need - where to meet after a disaster, contact information, and other key data that can be entered into one family phone and synchronized between them all.

During a natural disaster, infrastructure like wireless data can be unreliable. A key feature of Two Weeks Ready is to have all the information you need already loaded on your family's smartphones before the disaster. That way, everyone in your family has what they need without having to connect to the internet after a natural disaster.

The Two Weeks Ready application is open-source and developed on GitHub at https://github.com/HTBox/TwoWeeksReady

If you'd like to be part of what we're working on, take a look at the issues available and chat with us about how you'd like to contribute - we'd love to have you be part of this project!