A parking lot on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, in the heart of the Hurricane Sandy-ravaged New York coastline, has been serving as the base of operations for Team Rubicon, a volunteer organization staffed by military veterans who show up when disasters strike. The lot has many of the things you’d expect to see at a disaster-recovery site: stacks of hand tools, portable toilets, palettes of food, and water. What’s most interesting is the matte-green school bus parked in back.
Courtesy Team RubiconThat bus is a mobile command post, a place from which dispatchers can direct teams of volunteers to various addresses to assess damage, provide assistance, or call for supplies. To make that process more efficient, Team Rubicon employs software that is more commonly used on the battlefield but is now helping aid workers as they move from house to house.
The software comes from Palantir, a tech company in Silicon Valley that makes software used by the military, intelligence. and law-enforcement communities. Palantir’s software, which works on both laptops in the bus and on volunteers’ smartphones, allows dispatchers to see the volunteers’ locations, via their phones’ GPS function, along with the whereabouts of houses that need assistance. Aid workers can call up notes associated with a particular property and can add their own comments. They can also upload geo-tagged photos in case the address information is faulty and visual confirmation is more reliable.
Members of Team Rubicon and Palantir first met in August at the Classy Awards, a philanthropic awards ceremony held in San Diego. “The initial intent was to use Palantir to better understand their volunteer base,” says Jason Payne, who heads up Palantir’s “philanthropy engineering” team. The first plan was to more accurately match volunteers’ skills to needed tasks, but Sandy’s arrival forced a pivot to the more immediate concerns of recovery management. “It became an alpha or beta run to see how the platform could be applied to their activities on the ground,” Payne says.
Palantir’s software is designed to deal with large, disparate data sets, which can be useful in peacetime, as well as during conflicts. If you want to determine where to send aid, Payne explains, you would benefit by combining several layers of information: the status of neighborhood pharmacies and gas stations, demographic and census data, poverty rates, and other information. In the future, Payne says, such use of Palantir’s system could result in more accurate targeting of resources.
Team Rubicon began its efforts in the area on Oct. 29, and it plans to remain there until Dec. 3, at which point the group will hand over operations to longer-term recovery organizations. Its success with Palantir—the group has successfully managed more than 10,000 volunteers in the Rockaways—means that the software will likely be expanded to other aid groups. Payne mentions that such organizations as AmeriCorps, AmeriCares, and Points of Light have expressed interest in the platform.
Team Rubicon also plans to use the software again to make future relief campaigns faster and more efficient. “The Palantir software acts as a force-multiplier,” says Ford Sypher, a regional director of Team Rubicon who served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. The software addresses a common problem in dispatching crews for disaster relief: lack of real-time communication. “You’d send people out to check a house, and you had no idea where they were or what they needed until they came back,” says Brendan Kraft, a volunteer who was an Army public health technician. “Now we can all share information as it comes in.”
“Before we had this,” Kraft adds, gesturing toward the satellite map imagery, overlaid with data points, “we had a pad and a pen.”
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From Wartime Technology Comes Hurricane Relief
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