Engineering Crisis Response Software: Lessons Learnt from a Flint Water Crisis App Platform

As the role of software evolves to become more ubiquitous and pervasive by the proliferation of mobile devices in conjunction with vast computational cloud assets, its potential to facilitate targeted humanitarian relief efforts in real-time is unparalleled. Regrettably, effectively leveraging this potential is a new frontier as dominant efforts converge to more commercial endeavors. In 2014, policymakers for the City of Flint in Michigan made the decision to switch its water supply from the Detroit Water and Sewerage system to the Flint River. The result was a spike in lead levels for residential water supplies triggering a health crisis. In response, a team comprising of students and faculty from the University of Michigan campuses and Google volunteers designed and built a responsive mobile software platform. The forefront features of the MyWater-Flint platform allows for residents to geolocate resources, be informed on crisis developments, crowdsource data for decision making, and affords risk prediction through data analysis. In this paper, we overview the design considerations with a focus on the challenges encountered throughout the process. We present the generic multi platform architecture and methodology for community engagement through user experience design, and the consolidation, dissemination and synthesis of hyper-local information for rapid deployment during a crisis.