The CrisisCommunicator builds on today's disaster management solutions, implementing a Disaster Management Communication Information System, exchanging data messages via APRS, and providing a robust hardware device to access it's features. Every CrisisCommunicator operator will have access to information coming from all around the disaster area, in a distributed system with multiple redundancy.
The programming challenge closed last month, and now we are finally able to announce a Winner! Actually, it's winners - a team of three awesome geeks from Amrita University, in India.
In the early months of 2012 I was talking to the president of the local HAM operators club in Kollam, Kerala, India, Mr. K.R. Nagarajan about the CrisisCommunicator long before this became as big as it is today... and he got really excited!
Yesterday we officially launched our programming challenge!!!
It was an exciting day. We had chosen the April 20th as it is also my sister's birthday; amazingly, the date coincided with the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship's Startup Day 2013.
The Startup Day was the perfect venue to launch the challenge!
Chad Hamre, from Ethical Oceans, was one of the speakers at Startup Day. He, like us, is an engineer, searching for meaning.
Chad very kindly agreed to be the one to officially launch the programming challenge:
The CrisisCommunicator, as it stands today, is a blueprint, a plan, for a comprehensive tool that will leverage today's mobile computing technology (think: tablets) and disaster communication modalities (think: radio) to aid disaster responders in streamlining their response. It is being designed to work even with zero internet connectivity.
