STORMSENSOR & DESIGN SWARM FOR DIGITAL INCLUSION
On Saturday, February 4, StormSensor CEO Erin Rothman joined a group of about 60 of Seattle’s most brilliant minds at the Design Swarms Workshop for Digital Inclusion to identify and design a solution to address a problem that many of us don’t even know exists and yet has significant repercussions on individuals and communities the world over: getting access to digital technology for those less privileged. Yet these people have the most to gain from access to technology. To that end, Galvanize Seattle hosted a design swarm workshop, facilitating a hackathon-like innovation process in which agile teams of 8 to 10 people each develop a minimum viable experience. Our team won first place, as voted by representatives of the City of Seattle and several local homeless/immigrant support centers, for designing what we called data.me, which aggregates unused data from mobile plans into an app and allows access to that data for those who need it. Simple, (almost) free, and widely accessible.