keralarescue.in: open crisis mapping platform for the 2018 Kerala floods
Description
During the August 2018 Kerala floods, hundreds of volunteer developers built a crisis mapping and rescue coordination web platform and app. keralarescue.in (Django/Python, open source on GitHub from day 0) allowed registering rescue requests and locating shelters, camps, water levels and supplies. The Kerala government adopted it as its official site. ~1,500 technologists collaborated for free (some 69 in the main repo) and it received millions of requests. After the emergency the service stopped being maintained and the domain went inactive/for sale; the durable legacy is the open source repositories.
Lessons learned
The platform was built for a one-off emergency and was not sustained afterwards: the keralarescue.in domain went inactive and 'for sale' (parked, Sedo) in 2026. A double lesson: (1) civic disaster software needs a post-crisis maintenance and governance model, not just a volunteer sprint; (2) the durable value was not the service but the open source code on GitHub (rescuekerala repos, MIT license). Institutional sustainability, not technical sustainability, was the bottleneck.