Code for America’s Hurricane Response Activities
Code for America brigade members across the US volunteer during natural disasters to provide up-to-date and accurate information on shelters and food and water distribution points in the affected areas.
Although we’ve built technology to help in this effort, we firmly believe that during a response, the focus should not be on the tech, it should be on the people impacted by the disaster.
To that end, we’re proud to participate with the FEMA National Response Coordination Center’s Crowdsourcing Unit and partner with Red Cross and CEDR Digital Corps to deliver the best information we can get as quickly and effectively as possible to those who need it most.
We do that through both automated and human processes:
- Automated tools import data from other systems about shelters and distribution points, index and format that data, and present it in a variety of useful formats for our partners and for individuals in need.
- Volunteers call shelter and distribution point sites to ensure data stays up-to-date in our systems and participate in FEMA Crowdsourcing Coordination Calls during the response.
If you would like to contribute to this project, we welcome your help:
- All of our work is coordinated through Code for America’s Slack team in the
#hurricane_api
channel. To join, visit the Code for America Brigade Program and click on Join us on Slack. - Much of our technology work happens through Github in the
hurricane-response
organization. - To join the volunteers calling people, join the Slack team first. Folks there will connect you with the information you need to help out effectively.
You can also make tax-deductible donations to Code for America.
We look forward to working with you!