Glympse and Zello, two key apps used by Shawn and his group, were invented several years later. “The Cajun Navy was quick to jump into action for Hurricane Harvey,” said Shawn, “because we had prior experience.”Īs Kevin Sullivan and Peter Holley pointed out in the Washington Post, “Harvey is the largest natural disaster to play out in the United States since the dawn of this hyper-connected era.” The iPhone was released in 2007, two years after Katrina. Cajun Navy groups raced to help, deploying all of their new tools. One of the worst storms was Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in the fall of 2017.
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The model they began experimenting with in 2016 was put to the test the following year, when a series of hurricanes battered the Gulf Coast in what would become the most expensive hurricane season on record, ultimately inflicting over $200 billion in damage.
![cajun navy zello channel cajun navy zello channel](https://i1.wp.com/metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/app.jpg)
This innovation seems to have come at just the right time. “This is just one of those groups that came out of necessity and just has now relied on technology, social media, and beyond, to do things that the government organizations may not be equipped to do,” Shawn says. Volunteer dispatchers started using Zello to communicate with civilian boat operators, and they used Glympse to track their movements and match people in distress with the closest available volunteer.īy all accounts, it has had a dramatic impact on the Cajun Navy’s ability to organize and onboard new volunteers and coordinate their response in the field.
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“If I ever go onto talking about Ingress and my nerd side with members of the Cajun Navy,” he says, “they’re like, ‘Oh, there he goes again.'”īut however nerdy their origin, the group saw the value in Shawn’s insights and started building a protocol for how to use them. Shawn realized these game strategies and tools exactly fit the needs of the Cajun Navy, which needed to communicate with a geographically dispersed group of volunteers and precisely track the location of everyone in the field. Chief among those apps were Glympse, a location tracking app, and Zello, which turns any phone into a walkie talkie.
![cajun navy zello channel cajun navy zello channel](https://gray-wafb-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/Q_8oCy4xZThN5moKlj6WAIhw_ao=/980x0/smart/filters:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/OGAZGSDSP5AVRGWPAUFJX75DJ4.jpg)
The upshot for the Cajun Navy was that the best Ingress squads used third-party apps to communicate with teammates, track their locations, and coordinate their movements-in real space. (A few years later, the game developer Niantic would leverage the technology and insights from Ingress to create the viral sensation Pokémon Go.) Players “capture” land by visiting places in the real world and then weaving them together to create larger and larger virtual territories that have to be defended from the other team.
![cajun navy zello channel cajun navy zello channel](https://www.wdtn.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2021/02/FF7C3D23A81845FE9DC5224BE5383D5B.jpg)
The game consists of two teams competing for control over virtual land that corresponds to real physical locations.
![cajun navy zello channel cajun navy zello channel](https://cdn.startupitalia.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2017/09/Schermata-2017-09-11-alle-15.07.48-1024x557.png)
In his spare time, Shawn was an avid player of a location-based, augmented reality game called Ingress. His inspiration came from an unlikely source: a smartphone game. Soon after getting involved with volunteer rescue efforts, Shawn realized there was an opportunity to improve how volunteers organized themselves and handled requests for help. Shawn Boudreaux, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, was one of those new recruits.