The first
forty-eight hours
decide everything.
Sigil/Field turns every neighbour
with a phone into calibrated crisis intelligence.
A field-grade open-source protocol that fuses citizen photos, EXIF GPS, official air-raid feeds, satellite footprints and validator review into one trusted damage map. We assume the worst conditions — congested cell networks, exhausted reviewers, adversarial actors — and we ship anyway.
After a strike, an earthquake, a flood — the data exists. It's in every passerby's pocket. The 48-hour window closes before anyone collects it.
International triage protocols agree on one number: the first 48 hours after a sudden-onset event are when survivors are found and shelter is assigned. Yet humanitarian dashboards stay empty for days. The Standby Task Force's volunteer network of 103+ countries waits for verified reports that never come. MapSwipe has mapped 1.3 million km2 of crisis-affected geography — almost entirely from satellite, almost none from the ground.
Meanwhile xView2 winners hit 80 % damage-classification accuracy on aerial imagery; the wildfire-ViT goes deeper on the ground. The technology is sitting on the shelf. Sigil/Field is the protocol that picks it up, hardens it for adversarial conditions, and hands the result to the humanitarian system in HXL CSV by Tuesday morning.
The differentiator manifesto — what every other submission forgot to name.
The standard crisis-mapping tooling assumes a rational adult enumerator on a clean network, with no adversaries, no fatigue, no fraud. The real first 48 hours look nothing like that. Here is what we built for instead.
Same building, two damage levels — both reporters are honest.
Staged-photo trickery, caught before a reviewer sees the file.
Three sources, three pipelines — never averaged by accident.
The 9-year-old, the grandmother, the refugee with PTSD — all first-class users.
Sessions capped at 90 min. The dashboard insists on the break.
The map is already populated when the first citizen opens the app.
Public dashboard reveals reports only after five independent reporters cover the polygon. Differential-privacy ε ≈ 1.2 on exported counts.
A reporter can be trusted without being known.
Eight signals combine into one score before a human sees the file.
Each report runs through vision, EXIF GPS, official alerts, news cross-reference, perceptual-hash duplicate check, building-footprint match, timestamp sanity, and a reporter-trust ledger. A weighted composite drives the brief that lands on the validator's queue.
Bearing wall fracture + pancake debris matches G4 archetype.
Photo metadata coordinates 47.4017°N · 36.2747°E.
Alert ALT-2026-0521-19:42 (alarm.in.ua) running from 19:42 to 21:08 UTC.
Reuters, Iziar Oblast Press, Hromadske all reference Voznesenska damage.
No prior pHash match in archive. Not a repost.
Photo angle aligns with 9-storey wide footprint.
Sun azimuth in image is plausible for local time.
Account verified by enumerator chain.
“We don't ask the reviewer to be a detective. We hand them a calibrated brief in 12 seconds.”
Citizen, validator, mobile field — built so each surface respects the rhythm of its user.
Three screens, four minutes, no account. Photo, location, send.
Open the link, take three photos, tap on the building footprint, slide the damage grade. The on-device wildfire-ViT gives you instant feedback. Submit; the report queues locally if your network is down.
A queue of calibrated briefs. Swipe through fatigue without breaking quality.
Each card lands with its credibility score, photo coverage diagram, and the 8-signal stack. Reviewers triage at MapSwipe speed; the desk auto-rotates them off the queue at 90 min.
For enumerators living offline for weeks at a time — without compromise.
KoboToolbox-grade offline queueing. Background sync over Wi-Fi only. Whisper voice intake. A burn-identity button for high-risk regions. Ships as a PWA today; native shells follow.
The HXL CSV lands on a UN analyst's desk before breakfast.
ref,grade,building,lat,lng,credibility,reporter_tier,corrob,affected,alert_id#meta+ref,#severity+code,#loc+name,#geo+lat,#geo+lon,#indicator+confidence,#contact+tier,#count+corrob,#affected+num,#event+idSGL-A4Q7-91,G4,Voznesenska 16,47.40150,36.27450,92,verified,4,48,ALT-2026-0521-19:42SGL-K2M3-44,G3,Voznesenska 18,47.40130,36.27590,81,enumerator,2,22,ALT-2026-0521-19:42SGL-B7X1-08,G2,Voznesenska 14,47.40180,36.27310,84,verified,1,64,ALT-2026-0521-19:42SGL-F3R6-21,G2,Polyclinic № 4,47.40320,36.27190,88,ngo,2,180,ALT-2026-0521-19:42SGL-Q1A8-55,G3,Central Market N,47.40450,36.28110,79,enumerator,3,95,ALT-2026-0521-19:42- GeoJSONGIS pipeline
- KMLGoogle Earth
- ODataPower BI · Excel
- HXL CSVHDX / ReliefWeb
- XLSFormKoboCollect
- WMS / TMSMap server
- USGS FDSNlive
- GDACSlive
- ReliefWeblive
- alerts.in.ualive
- GDELTlive
- Copernicus EMSlive
Rapid deployment to a crisis area in 48 hours.
Every part of Sigil/Field ships as containers under an MIT licence. Operating a deployment requires one engineer-day; sustaining one requires a single regional admin and the Standby Task Force.
- 01Hour 0 · containerised deploy
One docker-compose pulls the API, the validator desk, the citizen PWA, the Nominatim self-host, and a postgres-with-PostGIS volume. Comes up on any $20/mo VPS.
- 02Hour 6 · regional admin onboarding
A local emergency-management officer maps the country into oblasts and assigns the 9 Standby-Task-Force roles via RBAC. XLSForm schema is editable without a redeploy.
- 03Hour 12 · QR-pushed citizen access
Local radio, Telegram channels and shelter posters all carry the same QR. The link resolves to a PWA that installs in 2 seconds, in the citizen's language.
- 04Hour 24 · validator volunteers
Standby Task Force activates 30-60 cross-timezone validators. The desk auto-rotates them after 90-min sessions. Translation team pulls the i18n strings.
- 05Hour 48 · public HDX pipeline
HXL CSV pushes to the country's HDX channel on a cron. ReliefWeb situation reports pull the export. UN analysts run Power BI off the same OData feed.
# deployment.yml — open-source playbook
crisis_kind: conflict
country: ua
languages: [uk, en]
study_area:
centroid: { lat: 47.4012, lng: 36.2754 }
bbox: { s: 47.3958, n: 47.4072, w: 36.2682, e: 36.2842 }
# Data layer
building_footprint_source: overture
osm_overpass_fallback: true
nominatim: self-hosted
# Cross-validation feeds
alert_apis:
- alarm-in-ua
- usgs-fdsn
- gdacs
- reliefweb
- gdelt
- copernicus-ems
# Privacy + ethics
identity_model: device-bound-pseudonymous
burn_identity: enabled
k_anonymity_threshold: 5
differential_privacy_epsilon: 1.2
# Reviewer protocol
reviewer_session_cap_min: 90
auto_rotate: true
peer_debrief_channel: anonymous
# Export
hxl_export_cron: "*/15 * * * *"
hdx_target: hdx-undp-ua
The next disaster is already being photographed.
The protocol exists. The footprints exist. The volunteers exist. Sigil/Field is the connective tissue that turns photographs in pockets into damage intelligence on a UN analyst's desk — in under 48 hours, every time.