And the winner is…
People who have friends and relatives they can rely on for help are healthier and live longer than those who don’t. Recent disasters, including the crises in Haiti, Japan and Joplin, Missouri, have demonstrated the power of Facebook and other social media to promote community resilience by allowing users to share information about their wellbeing and garner support from their networks. Last year, as part of our effort to enhance resilience, we issued ASPR’s first-ever application challenge to web developers across the country—to create a Facebook app that could enhance the resilience of individuals and communities by thinking about those connections in advance, allowing users to:
Identify three lifelines. A lifeline is someone you can count on in a disaster—a friend or relative who will agree to check on the user in an emergency, provide them with shelter, food, and other necessities, and perhaps even update the user’s social network about their wellbeing;
Create a personal preparedness plan and share it with their lifelines; and
Share the app with their Facebook friends so they can choose to identify lifelines, too.
This was our first experience with a contest like this, and we received a substantial number of entries. I would like to thank all of the developers for their creativity, great ideas and hard work. Selecting the top three proved to be an incredibly difficult decision. Fortunately, I was helped by some terrific advisors, including Craig Fugate, the Administrator of FEMA, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, the Director of the New Orleans Health Department, John Yi, from Facebook, and numerous ASPR staff.
The winner of the first place prize of $10,000, and complementary passes from Health 2.0 to attend their spring conference in Boston is Team ALP, for their app, “Lifeline.” Team ALP consists of two young and very talented innovators, Evan Donohue of North Carolina, and Erik Stayton of Massachusetts, who are recent Brown University graduates. In addition to allowing users to identify lifelines and complete a personal preparedness plan, Team ALP’s Lifeline app lets users collaborate on tracking the safety of their friends, increasing the efficiency of finding missing users. The app’s features—including a news feed and links to credible information sources—make it useful for large-scale disasters, as well as individual emergencies, such as car accidents and personal medical emergencies.
The winner of the second place prize of $5,000 is JAMAJIC 360, led by David Vinson, Erick Rodriguez, Gregg Orr, and Garth Winckler of Las Vegas, Nevada, for their self-named app. In third place is TrueTeamEffort, a team of 11 students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by Alex Kirlik, for their app, “Are You OK?” Congratulations to all of the winners!
To find the ‘lifeline’ app when it goes live on Facebook in the coming months—before the start of hurricane season—friend us on Facebook or sign up for alerts on phe.gov. Or both!
Even if you don’t use Facebook, you can plan ahead and talk with your family and friends about what you might need in an emergency, who you’d reach out to for help, where to look for you after a disaster strikes (maybe your house, a local shelter, or a family member’s place), and how to get in touch.
And, given the enthusiasm generated by this contest, we’re already planning another preparedness app challenge. So stay tuned.
