RapidFTR Helps Reunite Children and Parents After Large-Scale Emergencies

by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 23, 2010Comments (1)

Natural disasters and crisis situations are horrifying enough without the added issue of separated families and lost children. Open source project RapidFTR is mobile application designed to help aid workers reunite children with their parents.

RapidFTR lets emergency workers collect essential on-scene information about missing or found children such as age, family contact information, health status, and even a photograph. The data is automatically saved and added to a central database accessible by other crisis team workers. Registered aid workers can create and modify entries for children they're caring for, and search existing records to reunite parents and children separated by disaster.

Created by students at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, RapidFTR is under development with guidance from the UNICEF Emergencies Programme Division. Agile development company ThoughtWorks Studios has also donated programmers and agile project management software to the project.

RapidFTR needs more hands on deck, though, to keep the project moving forward. The team is looking for experienced Ruby on Rails developers, but there's plenty of work to go around for anyone who's interested -- particularly programmers with BlackBerry or Android skills. Check out RapidFTR's Google Group to learn more or get started with this valuable project.