Judge: Scaling Tools for Volunteer Mobilization

Last weekend I sat on a judging panel for a disaster-relief hackathon here in SF. Twelve teams, forty-eight hours, one shared obsession: how do you get the right volunteer to the right place at the right time when everything’s falling apart?

I’ve been thinking about this problem since 2011. Back then I co-founded Doare.org in Rio, which became the largest donation platform for non-profits in Latin America. Donations, though — not coordination. The coordination piece is orders of magnitude harder, and watching these teams wrestle with it brought back a familiar frustration.