Jointly: Peer-to-Peer Disaster Recovery App

My colleague Samia Kallidis is launching a brilliant self-help app to facilitate community-based disaster recovery efforts. Samia is an MFA Candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While her work on this peer-to-peer app began as part of her thesis, she has since been accepted to the NEA Studio Incubator Program to make her app a reality. NEA provides venture capital to help innovative entrepreneurs build transformational initiatives around the world. So huge congrats to Samia on this outstanding accomplishment. I was already hooked back in February when she presented her project at NYU and am even more excited now. Indeed, there are exciting synergies with the MatchApp project I’m working on with QCRI and MIT-CSAIL , which is why we’re happily exploring ways to collaborate & complement our respective initiatives.

Samia’s app is aptly called Jointly and carries the tag line: “More Recovery, Less Red Tape.” In her February presentation, Samia made many very compelling arguments for a self-help approach to disaster response based on her field research and interviews she conducted following Hurricane Sandy. She rightly noted that many needs that arise during the days, weeks and months following a disaster do not require the attention of expert disaster response professionals—in fact these responders may not have the necessary skills to match the needs that frequently arise after a disaster (assuming said responders even stay the course). Samia also remarked that solving little challenges and addressing the little needs that surface post-disaster can make the biggest differences. Hence Jointly. In her own words:

“Jointly is a decentralized mobile application that helps communities self-organize disaster relief without relying on bureaucratic organizations. By directly connecting disaster victims with volunteers, Jointly allows individuals to request help through services and donations, and to find skilled volunteers who are available to fulfill those needs. This minimizes waste of resources, reduces duplication of services, and significantly shortens recovery time for individuals and communities.”

Samia kindly shared the above video and screenshots of Jointly below.

I’m thrilled to see Jointly move forward and am excited to be collaborating with Samia on the Jointly and MatchApp connection. We certainly share the same goal: to help people help themselves. Indeed, increasing this capacity for self-organization builds resilience. These connection technologies and apps provide for more rapid and efficient self-help actions in times of need. This doesn’t mean that professional disaster response organizations are obsolete—quite on the contrary, in fact. Organizations like the American Red Cross can feed relevant service delivery data to the apps so that affected communities also know where, when and how to access these. In Jointly, official resources will be geo-tagged and updated live in the “Resources” part of the app.

You can contact Samia directly at: hello@jointly.us should you be interested in learning more or collaborating with her.