Crisis Management Platform

Inspiration

We, the Projektfabrik and their connected partners, have been working on the topic of crisis management since the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ catastrophe in 2010. The aim is and was, to gather the knowledge of the crowd over the internet and help solve the problems of our planet - virtual, connected and a bound to a honour codex.

What it does

Since then we have created a groundwork of identifying experts, valid data bases and statistics as source of information. We found people, who are able to help create this crisis management tool through their experience and expertise. Together with universities we also created research proposals of our concept, and even though receiving positive feedback, initially we fell short due to on one hand no clearly identified end user, as well as too small of backing resources. Nonetheless, we are carrying on to pursue the concept idea, until we the time seems right. This seems to be the case right now.

The Crisis Management Platform connects existing data sources as a tool for interdisciplinary expert teams. It reproduces complex crisis situations and generates specific questions to the open crowd. The receiving inputs from the crowd are then filtered and given to expert teams for evaluation. The expert teams then have the possibility to evaluate these through the use of AR, VR and AI technologies, from where valid concepts can then be presented to corresponding departments and/or authorities.

Next to this, the platform is building up a realistic training platform, which similar to a flight simulator, creates relivable scenarios that are constantly updated from validated data sources. Psychologist have found that people, who successfully master crisis situations are able to do this over and over again, therefore making a platform such as the Crisis Management Platform a necessity for tackling current and future crisis situations.

How we built it

The Crisis Management Platform is currently at a concept stage. We have created an animation video that is there to communicate and visualise the use of the platform, with specific focus on the current Covid-19 crisis, with previous animations looking at the issues of plastic pollution, cybersecurity and mass-migrations due to climate change. Now we feel the time has come to instantiate the platform and bring it to market.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, new tools. To get familiar with them was not quite easy but with the helping hands of the Org Team and the mentors we found out how it works.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On Friday 20.03.2020 the hackathon #wirVSvirus was announced. We were positively surprised, as we would not have thought politics would take such a step and take patronage of this action. 43.000 people participated in the hackathon, without the promise of a prize money, to collectively find and develop solutions against the COVID-19 virus. We have learnt and gathered a lot of new insights from the German hackathon, and now are ready to be joining the ‘Global Hack’.

What we learned

We learned, that the spirit of all members of the hackathon is extraoridinary powerful. Creative ideas and protoypes. But now we see, that it is neccessary to bring selected solutions to one platform. We must consolidate, but we want to invite all others to optimize information and solutions. We are working on strategic impacts. E.g. the interdependencies of a lack of drugs, tests or medical aid products and the increasing number of infecitons.

What's next for ourCrisis Management Platform

We have gathered valid solutions from the submissions and connected ourselves to the individuals who created them. We now need the support of the hackathon #wirVSvirus team to launch the crisis management platform. #wirVSvirus was before the Global Hack initiative, that will happen from April 09th-12th 2020. We are looking for further teamembers now.

We are hoping that the targeted prototype will consist of the results of the current hackathon, where hundreds of ideas addressing all kinds of issues, are presented within the set time of 48 hours. From there, we would like to bring the gathered findings and concepts to the platform, and advance them with their original creators, while implementing them with the use of AI, VR and AR.

What we need now, is the combined support from the hackathon team and its many participants, as well as people who are able to help gather data from the ‘weVSvirus’ data pool and put them as prototypes on the crisis management platform.

Lastly, one other major challenge is the financing of the Concept, where we hope to gather the support of Foundations or Crowdfunding platforms.