A GenBridge project
Situational awareness for neighborhoods.
Erta gives neighborhood volunteers and community networks the situational awareness agencies have, without handing agencies a list of residents.
Status: prototype. Erta is being developed for testing in New York and New Orleans. A Spanish and English version is adapted for southern Bogotá. Screens are shown with sample data. Demos are by request.
The gap
Agencies have maps and sensors. Neighbors see what changes first: a new crack, a blocked drain, who cannot climb stairs. The link between them is weak, and lists of vulnerable residents carry risks of their own.
We think communities should be contributors to risk intelligence, not only recipients of alerts, and that information must reach people who can act on it while protecting the people it describes.
How it works
Captains
Volunteers check on neighbors one floor or door at a time, with a tap, from any phone. No app and no account.
Coordinators
A community network sees its status, the buildings that need attention first and what people reported, and replies to its captains.
City or agency
Sees counts, never names, and sends requests that networks can accept or decline.
Four rules
Counts, not people
Names, phone numbers, medical details and immigration or legal status are never collected. Agencies see totals.
Rules you can inspect
Every building ranking shows the rule and the public data behind it. No AI makes decisions.
Unknown is never safe
Missing data is shown as unknown and adds no points.
Answers go both ways
Coordinators reply to captains, networks and agencies reply to each other, and rumors are flagged and corrected.
In the prototype today
- Check-ins floor by floor or door by door, with the kind of help needed.
- Building rankings from public data, matched to the event: heat, flooding, landslide, earthquake or wildfire.
- Live public weather, air quality and earthquake data.
- Rumor flagging, and two-way messages between captains, coordinators and the city.
- English and Spanish, and check-ins that wait for a signal if it drops.
Further development is planned with feedback from community networks and agency partners.