Archive of posts with tag 'Fulcrum Community'

2020 Ready: Field Data Collection with Fulcrum

February 4, 2020 • #

Today we hosted a webinar in conjunction with our friends at NetHope and Team Rubicon to give an overview of Fulcrum and what we’re collectively doing in disaster relief exercises.

Both organizations deployed to support recent disaster events for Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Dorian (the Bahamas) and used Fulcrum as a critical piece of their workflow.

Always enjoyable to get to show more about what we’re doing to support impactful efforts like this.

✦

Field Data Collection with Fulcrum, Mapbox, and NetHope →

November 6, 2019 • #

I wrote this wrap-up summary of our hands-on workshop we did at the NetHope Summit in San Juan. It was a great joint session with Mikel from Mapbox and John from NetHope. I’d love to do more of these in the future. Hands-on sessions where we can get outside and see our stuff in action always teach you a lot about how your UX works in practice.

I got to see more of what Kepler can do, too — the open source GIS toolkit built by the Uber team. Pretty slick stuff.

✦

Learning from Disaster →

August 21, 2019 • #

Through Fulcrum Community, we’ve been working with the team from NetHope to support their needs in responding to disasters around the world. In their work, they help first-responders in humanitarian crises around the world with connectivity and communications when it’s knocked out — cellular coverage, phone communications, and internet access.

This week they’re hosting an event in the hills of central California, mocking up a disaster scenario to experiment in how relief organizations can embrace technology and collaborate with one another.

The DRT event is conducted over a five-day period with trainers from CiscoTacOps, emergency.lu, Ericsson Response, Facebook, and Redline Communications. The first three days of each module focus on theory and practical hands-on training on NH deployed network, P2P, power, VSAT, mobile SatCom and TVWS solutions.

The participants from Google, Facebook, AWS, and Team Rubicon all go through the classroom training and are then deployed to operate in a 48-hour emergency Simulated Exercise (SIMEX). Participants employ NetHope’s mobilization procedures as in a “real-life” emergency to determine how well they can apply the recently learned technical skills in the field while submerged in austere living conditions.

Joe is out there from our team to give the rundown on how Fulcrum can be deployed in disaster environments, as we’ve helped with dozens of times around the world. It’s cool to see this engagement with our tech for such positive work.

✦

Team Rubicon Leverages Fulcrum in Cyclone Idai Response →

August 6, 2019 • #

This is the kind of stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning and really gets the motivators up to do things like Fulcrum Community to support disaster relief efforts.

When Cyclones Idai and Kenneth steamrolled into East Africa beginning in March, the crew from Team Rubicon was deployed to help with EMT response and recovery in Beira and Matarara, Mozambique. They used Fulcrum to record patient data after prior experience with another partner of ours, NetHope:

Earlier in 2019, Team Rubicon deployed with NetHope to install wireless access points on the Colombia/Venezuela border to provide Venezuelan refugees with access to news information and offers of assistance. NetHope utilized Fulcrum to track access-point install requests as well as record successful installs. Team Rubicon received training on Fulcrum during the deployment and grew to like the offline form entry capability, ability to change forms on the fly, and manipulate and analyze the collected information via the console. When faced with the need to collect medical information in an internet-disconnected environment and transmit reports later when within range of internet, Team Rubicon reached out to Fulcrum for support. Fulcrum provided a community disaster grant to facilitate Team Rubicon’s Cyclone Idai response, including developer assistance to rapidly publish medical forms.

Fulcrum did exactly what we designed it for, providing a robust data platform in an austere, low-comms environment easy for field EMTs to use:

Fulcrum allowed Team Rubicon to quickly enter patient data as well as the multi-sector needs assessment data in a completely disconnected environment. And since the Fulcrum app works on a cellular phone, there was no longer a need to pack bulky and heavy paper forms. Once back at base camp, and with access to internet, Team Rubicon could transmit the daily collected information to its National Operations Center so they could generate the EMT/CC daily reports in the format the EMT/CC preferred.

We’re already looking at other ways we can help the amazing folks from Team Rubicon on future missions with data, reporting, and impact analysis.

✦

Weekend Reading: Hurricanes, Long Games, and AirPods

March 30, 2019 • #

⛈ Hurricane Season 2017: A Coordinated Reconnaissance Effort

The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:

The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection and curation of perishable data in DesignSafe. Auburn’s David Roueche, the team’s Data Standards Lead, was especially enthusiastic about the team’s customized Fulcrum mobile smartphone applications to support standardized assessments of continental U.S. and Caribbean construction typologies, as well as observations of hazard intensity and geotechnical impacts.

It worked so well that the team transitioned their efforts into a pro-bono Fulcrum Community site that supports crowdsourced damage assessments from the public at large with web-based geospatial visualization in real time. This feature enabled coordination with teams from NIST, FEMA, and ASCE/SEI. Dedicated data librarians at each regional node executed a rigorous QA/QC process on the backside of the Fulcrum database, led by Roueche.

🧘🏻‍♂️ The Surprising Power of the Long Game

Ever since my health issues in 2017, the value of the little things has become much more apparent. I came out of that with a renewed interest in investing in mental and physical health for the future. Reading about, thinking about, and practicing meditation have really helped to put the things that matter in perspective when I consider consciously how I spend my time. This piece is a simple reminder of the comparative value of the “long game”.

🎧 AiriPods

In this piece analyst Horace Dediu calls AirPods Apple’s “new iPod”, drawing similarities to the cultural adoption patterns.

The Apple Watch is now bigger than the iPod ever was. As the most popular watch of all time, it’s clear that the watch is a new market success story. However it isn’t a cultural success. It has the ability to signal its presence and to give the wearer a degree of individuality through material and band choice but it is too discreet. It conforms to norms of watch wearing and it is too easy to miss under a sleeve or in a pocket.

Not so for AirPods. These things look extremely different. Always white, always in view, pointed and sharp. You can’t miss someone wearing AirPods. They practically scream their presence.

I still maintain this is their best product in years. I hope it becomes a new platform for voice interfaces, once they’re reliable enough.

✦

Weekend Reading: Fulcrum in Santa Barbara, Point Clouds, Building Footprints

February 2, 2019 • #

👨🏽‍🚒 Santa Barbara County Evac with Fulcrum Community

Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for flooding and debris flow risk throughout the county. They’ve deployed over 100 volunteers so far to go door-to-door and help residents evacuate safely. In their initial pilot they visited 1,500 residents. With this platform the County can monitor progress in real-time and maximize their resources to the areas that need the most attention.

“This app not only tremendously increase the accountability of our door-to-door notifications but also gave us a real time tracking on the progress of our teams. We believe it also reduced the time it has historically taken to complete such evacuation notices.”

This is exactly what we’re building Community to do: to help enable groups to collaborate and share field information rapidly for coordination, publish information to the public, and gather quantities of data through citizens and volunteers they couldn’t get on their own.

☁️ USGS 3DEP LiDAR Point Clouds Dataset

From Howard Butler is this amazing public dataset of LiDAR data from the USGS 3D Elevation Program. There’s an interactive version here where you can browse what’s available. Using this WebGL-based viewer you can even pan and zoom around in the point clouds. More info here in the open on GitHub.

🏢 US Building Footprints

Microsoft published this dataset of computer-generated building footprints, 125 million in all. Pretty incredible considering how much labor it’d take to produce with manual digitizing.

✦

Browse the full archive →

✦