CEDR Digital Corps

CEDR Digital Corps are digital helpers during disasters. We harness the power and wisdom of the crowd to provide vital situational awareness to emergency management agencies during disaster, while simultaneously providing critical factual information to the public from official sources. We leverage technology and social media to quickly gather and vet critical information about conditions on the ground. All the data collection and dissemination is to help both first responders and impacted individuals in disaster areas.

Last year, as members of a spontaneous group of volunteers, we:

• mapped over 12,000 data points related to: infrastructure conditions, gasoline, power, and water/food distribution points
• broadcasted over 100 Zello Broadcasts in Spanish and English regarding conditions in Puerto Rico to an audience of over 1,000 subscribers
• authored and published unique hurricane-related health and safety social media and blog posts in several languages as a means to reach and help those in disaster zones
• supported Puerto Rican citizens with a variety of strategies to counter the information vacuum that occurred when their communications infrastructure collapsed.

Between July 30-Aug 29 2018, CEDR posted over 1,200 tweets amplifying local, state and ICM social media messages related to four national level wildfires and one major hurricane. Our active engagement with the public during that period, garnered over 1.3M organic impressions and resulted in over 1,000 retweets of a critical FEMA map.