Case study
Volunteer projectOne page, one volunteer: coordinating 100+ people to digitize hospital lists after the Venezuela earthquakes
After the June 2026 earthquakes in Venezuela, volunteers were transcribing handwritten hospital lists so families could find their relatives. The work was stalling on coordination, not effort. In two hours we built a web app that gave every volunteer a unique page to transcribe.
At a glance
- Our role
- Solution design and development
- Build time
- ~2 hours
- Type
- Volunteer project, unpaid
- Users
- 100+ remote volunteers
- Output
- 50+ hospital lists, 300+ handwritten pages
- Status
- Offline. In active use for at least two weeks after launch
Context
In June 2026, two earthquakes (magnitude 7.2 and 7.5) hit Venezuela. Hospitals posted handwritten lists of admitted patients on their doors so families could check whether a relative was inside.
A volunteer group was turning photos of those lists into a searchable database, so anyone could look for a relative from anywhere in the world. They were recruiting remote helpers online.
The problem
There was no shortage of volunteers. The problem was allocation.
New lists were dropped into a WhatsApp group, and everyone started on whichever one they saw first. The same list could be transcribed five times while others sat untouched. Duplicates polluted the database families were searching, and nobody could tell what was finished and what was still pending.
The group had plenty of labor and no mechanism for dividing it.
The solution we designed
We didn’t rebuild their system. Volunteers kept entering data exactly where they already did. We added the missing piece on top: a minimal web app built around one rule, one page, one person.
- Upload a list. A PDF or photos of the handwritten list, or an Excel file for typed ones.
- Join with just your name. No sign-up, no password. In a crisis, every extra step loses volunteers.
- Get a unique assignment. The app hands you one page of the PDF, or a range of rows in an Excel file. The next person gets the next one. Two people can never work on the same page.
- See each list’s progress. Everyone can see what’s done and what’s left, which makes gaps obvious and pushes people to finish a list instead of starting a new one.
Results
50+
hospital lists processed
100+
volunteers coordinated
300+
handwritten pages digitized without duplicate work
Still in daily use two weeks
after launch
Two hours of building on our side. Everything else was done by those 100+ people. That ratio is the point.
Takeaway
In a crisis, the bottleneck is often coordination, not goodwill. The most useful software here wasn’t sophisticated: it was the smallest thing that removed the friction, shipped the same day, on top of the tools people were already using.