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You’re on Watch Duty!
The past ninety days have been some of the most exciting and challenging of my career. I am deeply moved by the generosity of my community, both in Silicon Valley and the Russian River Valley, that came together to create the first citizen driven disaster intelligence platform.
With almost no capital and only donations of human capital and services from companies like Zenput, Amazon Web Services, Heroku (a Salesforce Company), and Sixième Son, we went from a team with an idea to deployment to growth in one quarter.
As many of you know, I left my company a little less than one year ago to build my first non-profit, the Sherwood Forestry Service. It was founded with the belief that given the right environment and leadership with no money changing hands we can take idle human potential and make it dangerously kinetic.
Today, I am happy to announce that we have done just that with the public release of Watch Duty. Our application is piloted by skilled radio operators, firefighters, and citizen information officers who will provide up-to-the-minute information pushed directly to your phone. Citizens will also be able upload geotagged photos of what they’re seeing on the ground to help first responders and other citizens find danger. Our goal is to help discover and track wildfire hazards in real time without having to look for it. What we are creating will be the most actionable and accurate system of record for disaster intelligence built to date.