There is a parking lot on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, in the heart of the Hurricane Sandy-ravaged New York coastline, that has been serving as the base of operations for Team Rubicon, a volunteer organization staffed by military veterans who show up when disaster strikes. 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. But what’s most interesting is the matte-green school bus parked in the back.
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 the laptops in the bus and volunteers’ smartphones, allows dispatchers to see each volunteer’s location via their phone’s GPS function and the location of houses that need assistance. Aid workers can call up any notes associated with a particular property, as well as add their own. They can also upload geo-tagged photos, in case address information is faulty and a 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 when Sandy hit, it 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 is useful in peacetime as well as during conflict. If you want to determine where to send aid, Payne explains, you would benefit by combining several layers of information: the statuses of neighborhood pharmacies and gas stations, demographic and census data, poverty rates and other information. In the future, Payne says, this use of Palantir’s system could result in more accurate targeting of resources.
Team Rubicon began its efforts in the area on October 29, and plans to remain there until December 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 the software will likely be expanded to other aid groups. Payne mentions that organizations like 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 and former 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 to the satellite map imagery overlaid with data points, “we had a pad and a pen.”
