“After twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, thousands of people took to social media, pleading for help locating friends and family. The interim government was slow to act, but help came quickly from an unexpected source: developers and programmers…

The earthquakes killed more than 3,800 people, and destroyed homes and hospitals. Telecommunications infrastructure, including a submarine fiber-optic cable and mobile network towers, was severely damaged. Power outages added to the challenge of accessing the internet.

With a near-total absence of state support, Venezuelan citizens and diaspora members like Bastidas stepped in. Within hours of the quakes, volunteer developers in Miami, San Francisco, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere used AI to quickly build websites to report missing persons, coordinate donation drives, assess structural damage to buildings, map hospital capacity, locate shelters, and reunite pets with owners…

'Everything the state should be doing is being done by civil society,” Hernández said. 'People could have been putting their efforts somewhere else, but what we did was fill the state’s role however we could, with what we had.'”

From Rest of World.