GroundTruth turns photos from frightened residents into trust-scored humanitarian intelligence. Every report cross-checked against satellite footprints, event feeds, news, EXIF, perceptual hashes, and reporter history — automatically. Submitted to the UNDP Crisis Mapping Challenge, May 2026.
We took the challenge specification and asked what it quietly assumes — assumptions that field experience contradicts. Three reframings shape every architectural decision in GroundTruth.
Existing tools were designed by aid workers for aid workers, then handed to the public. They assume someone has the bandwidth to read a form after a 6.4 earthquake. The first screen we built asks a different question: are you safe right now?
Ushahidi accepts everything and asks validators to triage by hand. Rule-based filters reject everything that fails a single signal. Neither is honest. GroundTruth produces a graded 0-100 score from six independent signals, visible to both reporter and validator.
Real disasters present intermittent signal — one bar that comes and goes; a tower that survived but is congested. We treat the network as a graph of opportunistic peers, relaying reports over Bluetooth-mesh with a four-hop TTL.
A community reporter PWA for residents in affected areas. A validator dashboard for UNDP analysts in operations centres. A mobile experience designed for the worst day of someone's life. Open each demo below.
No report is "verified" or "rejected" by a single rule. Every submission is scored 0-100 from six independent signals — each one weighted, auditable, and explainable to the reporter before they even submit.
One of the ten seeded reports in the QA dashboard is a fake — a recycled news photograph from the 2023 Hatay earthquake, submitted with falsified location data. GroundTruth catches it on four independent signals before any human reviewer touches it.
The brief asked for crowdsourcing with offline support. We added three structural innovations that no current humanitarian tool delivers at once: pre-submission trust prediction, BLE-mesh relay, and full open-source replicability.
The reporter sees the same signal stack the validator will see — but before they tap send. Missing EXIF? They are offered to add another photo with location services on. AI classifier disagrees? They are nudged but never blocked. This single design choice converts contested reports into corroborated ones.
When the local tower is congested or down, GroundTruth uses Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 to relay queued reports through nearby devices — four-hop TTL, encrypted payloads, MAC rotation every 15 minutes. Anyone who finds signal carries everyone's data with them.
UNDP's open building footprint dataset becomes the spatial backbone. All exports are open formats (GeoJSON, CSV, HXL) compatible with existing humanitarian pipelines. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary classifier. Any partner agency can fork the platform and stand up their own deployment in 48 hours.
Every component is a well-known open-source project with a long maintenance horizon. No exotic dependencies. No vendor lock-in. A UNDP engineer can take this codebase and stand it up on AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-prem inside a working day.
The codebase is Apache 2.0. Any humanitarian agency — anywhere — can fork GroundTruth and stand up their own deployment by the end of next week. No license fee, no proprietary classifier, no long-term obligation to a single vendor.