Emergency Info — Designing a Distributed Crisis Data Platform

In this initiative, I led the architecture and development of a distributed crisis data platform supporting mobile, desktop, and web applications for remote data capture during disaster-response operations. The system required reliable synchronization, integrity validation, and resilient design under limited connectivity conditions across multi-country deployments.

The Context

Emergency Info was an application suite consisting of mobile/PDA, Windows, and Web applications designed to capture and manage survey data from remote locations.

It was initially deployed during the Sri Lanka Tsunami crisis by UNDP and later adopted by multiple countries.

The platform needed to operate in environments with limited connectivity while ensuring data consistency and integrity.

The Challenge

The system required:

Designing distributed data capture mechanisms across remote locations
Ensuring synchronization between mobile devices and central systems
Maintaining data integrity under unstable connectivity conditions
Supporting flexible survey configuration across different use cases
Operating reliably in crisis and disaster response environments

Failure in design would directly affect field-level data accuracy.

My Contribution

I led the architecture and development of the Emergency Info suite by:

Designing the distributed architecture across mobile, Windows, and Web applications
Structuring survey configuration frameworks to allow flexible data capture
Implementing synchronization mechanisms to maintain consistency across remote deployments
Ensuring integrity checks and validation workflows
Guiding development teams across multi-platform implementation

The focus was not just feature delivery, but reliable data capture under operational constraints.

What This Shaped in Me

This experience strengthened my understanding that:

Distributed systems must prioritize data integrity over feature velocity
Architecture must consider real-world constraints, not ideal conditions
Reliability is critical when systems support humanitarian operations
Simplicity in design often determines operational success

It deepened my appreciation for building systems that operate in unpredictable environments.