ResQOps

I built Sentinel inside ResQOps, the coordinator portal for ResQ, to help humanitarian teams answer a question that a weather forecast alone cannot: **If heavy rain is coming, what can we do today with the people, vehicles and supplies we actually have?** The idea started at a UNDP-organized Designathon in 2025. Practitioners described having plenty of willing volunteers, but their records were scattered across systems. When a disaster struck, coordinators still had to piece together who was available, what they were qualified to do and how to reach them. We spent the Designathon learning about the technologies and understanding the challenge; we didn’t develop an application there. I came back to the problem because it seemed a shame for communities to have people ready to help and still struggle to get that help where it was needed. Two other events shaped what I built. The first was the June 2026 earthquakes in Venezuela. Android phones detected an earthquake already under way and warned people before the strongest shaking reached them. Harvard reported that 11.4 million alerts went out and that some people had seconds to as much as two minutes to take cover. What stayed with me was that a phone someone already owned gave them time to protect themselves. It got me thinking about what technology could do for the people responsible for preparing an entire community. The second was following the repeated warnings about El Niño closer to home in Kenya. In October, the World Meteorological Organization warned that wetter conditions were more likely in parts of East Africa, raising concern about heavy rain and flooding. Watching that coverage, I kept thinking about the gap between knowing a difficult season may be coming and being ready for it. A government or humanitarian team can receive the outlook and still have unanswered questions about which roads to check, who can staff a shelter and whether the vehicle listed on a spreadsheet is available. ResQ serves both sides of that problem. Volunteers use ResQ to find missions, receive instructions, communicate with coordinators and record their contribution. My hackathon focus is the coordinator’s side: **ResQOps brings the people and resources together; Sentinel helps the coordinator decide what to prepare.** For example, a coordinator can open the hazard map, select a heavy-rain forecast and ask which preparations make sense over the next three days. Sentinel shows when and where the forecast crosses regional thresholds, what local evidence is available and what is still unknown. From that assessment, the coordinator can open a staffing and equipment proposal, see which needs the organization can meet, and change or reject the plan before approving it. If the only available vehicle has since been reserved, the system requires a fresh proposal.