Helpmap Agency is a nonprofit organization facilitating community-led climate adaptation through open source technology, participatory design, research, training, and public infrastructure.
Our work is based on the simple principle of residential knowledge—the communities closest to risk understand it best. We work with residents, researchers, governments, educators, humanitarian organizations, designers, and civil society partners to develop adaptation technologies and climate readiness strategies that reflect local knowledge and respond to real community needs.
At the center of this work is CogniCity OSS, an open source system for community reporting, mapping, coordination, and shared intelligence for emergency response and recovery, as well as the ongoing work of organizing around chronic environmental issues.
What is Helpmap Agency?
Helpmap Agency is a nonprofit organization dedicated to community-led climate adaptation and open source public infrastructure.
We develop, steward, test, and deploy adaptation technologies that help communities share information, prepare for climate risks, coordinate during emergencies, and strengthen their capacity to respond and recover together.
Our work combines technology with participatory research, public education, community engagement, design, training, and long-term partnerships.
Technology is an important part of adaptation but it is not enough. Accessible and equitable adaptation requires trust, local knowledge, institutional cooperation, meaningful information, and the ability of communities to act together.
What does Helpmap Agency mean by “adaptation technology”?
Adaptation technology includes digital systems, tools, methods, and infrastructure that help people and institutions understand changing environmental conditions, prepare for risks, communicate during emergencies, coordinate responses, and support recovery. For Helpmap, adaptation technology is not only open source software. It includes the technical infrastructure, community relationships, information practices, training, governance, and local knowledge necessary to make that software transformative in real-world conditions.
Why is Helpmap community-led?
The people living with environmental risks often understand their neighborhoods, infrastructure, vulnerabilities, and capacities in ways that cannot be reproduced by a remote technology provider or administrator. Helpmap builds for deployments through collaboration with residents, grassroots organizations, universities, emergency managers, government agencies, humanitarian organizations, educators, and other local partners. The objective is to adapt technology to local conditions and ensure that communities have a meaningful role in shaping how it works.
Why does Helpmap focus on climate readiness?
Climate change is already affecting how communities experience heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, storms, droughts, air quality, infrastructure disruption, displacement, and other hazards. Climate readiness is an immediate challenge involving how communities understand risk, communicate, coordinate, make decisions, and care for one another with dignity and compassion as conditions change. Helpmap Agency focuses on building the public infrastructure needed to support long-term climate readiness.
How can adaptation address both chronic environmental challenges and episodic emergency events?
Effective adaptation must address both chronic environmental pressures and episodic emergencies. That requires systems that are built for multiple purposes, able to operate across different time scales, and flexible enough to respond as conditions change over time. Many legacy systems and incumbent platforms were designed for much narrower mandates and cannot be repurposed to meet this combined challenge. Helpmap treats innovation as the strategic repurposing and integration of existing systems, data, infrastructure, and community knowledge, so they can support climate readiness, real-time emergency response, and long-term adaptation strategies.
Is Helpmap Agency a government organization?
No. Helpmap Agency is an independent nonprofit organization. We work with governments and public agencies where appropriate, but we are not ourselves a government agency. This independence allows us to work with communities, universities, civil society and humanitarian organizations, and various public institutions while maintaining our nonprofit and open source mission.
Is Helpmap Agency an emergency service?
No. Helpmap Agency develops technologies that can support emergency information sharing, readiness, community awareness, response, and recovery, but the organization is not an emergency dispatch service. Platforms developed or supported by Helpmap Agency do not replace 911, emergency responders, official warning systems, evacuation orders, or instructions issued by relevant public authorities. If you are in immediate danger, contact the appropriate emergency service.
What is CogniCity OSS?
CogniCity OSS is an open source software developed for real-time disaster reporting, mapping, and community awareness and coordination. It emerged from more than a decade of fieldwork, design research, and operational deployments with disaster-affected communities in the Global South. Its underlying approach has been used for large-scale emergency mapping in Indonesia and the Philippines, and adapted for projects and pilots elsewhere in the world. CogniCity OSS transforms individual, location-based observation into shared public information that helps residents, responders, community organizations, media workers, and public agencies understand rapidly changing conditions.
What is Helpmap Agency's relationship to CogniCity OSS?
Helpmap Agency is committed to the ongoing stewardship, development, and public availability of CogniCity OSS. This means maintaining and extending the open source technology, supporting deployments, developing documentation and training, working with communities to improve the system, and ensuring that the knowledge created through this work remains available as a public resource. Our objective is not simply to preserve a code repository. Much more broadly, our aim is to sustain a living ecosystem of open adaptation technology that communities can continue to use, adapt, and improve.
What does “open source” mean?
Open source means that software source code can be inspected, studied, tested, adapted, and improved by others under its applicable open-source license. For public interest emergency infrastructure, this matters because communities and institutions cannot depend on closed, proprietary systems that are only accessible to the vendor. Open source development makes the technology more transparent, adaptable, auditable, and capable of being maintained and improved over time.
Why is open source so important to Helpmap Agency?
Climate adaptation is a global challenge, but communities have radically different capacities, languages, risks, institutions, and resources. A proprietary system controlled by a single vendor cannot easily become shared global infrastructure. However, open source software allows communities, governments, researchers, developers, and civil society organizations to inspect technologies, adapt them to local conditions, connect them to other systems, build new capabilities, and contribute improvements. For Helpmap Agency, open source is much more than a software licensing decision—it st is part of our commitment to equitable, accessible, dignified, and compassionate climate readiness and adaptation.
What does Helpmap mean by “digital public goods”?
Digital public goods are technologies and information resources designed to create public value and remain broadly accessible rather than being controlled exclusively through proprietary systems. CogniCity OSS is part of Helpmap Agency's effort to build a global commons of adaptation technology: shared infrastructure that communities can inspect, learn from, adapt, and improve. We believe adaptation infrastructure should become more useful as more communities participate in its development and localization.
Does open source mean Helpmap's production systems are open to everyone?
No. Open source software and open access to operational infrastructure are completely different things. Publishing source code does not provide public access to production servers, administrative systems, cloud accounts, passwords, credentials, private databases, security logs, restricted APIs, or other protected infrastructure. Open source development does not eliminate normal cybersecurity practices or access controls.
Can my organization use CogniCity OSS?
CogniCity OSS is available under its applicable open source license. Organizations can inspect, study, deploy, adapt, and contribute to the software subject to those license terms. Helpmap Agency also works with organizations and communities that need assistance adapting, implementing, testing, training, or sustaining CogniCity OSS-based systems in real-world environments. Contact us to work on a new instance together.
How does Helpmap Agency approach privacy?
Our approach to privacy begins with data minimization. Helpmap develops community reporting systems, but we only want to collect information about the environmental condition or emergency—not unnecessary information about the person reporting it. If someone reports a flooded intersection, wildfire smoke, a blocked road, extreme heat, damaged infrastructure, or another emergency condition, the useful information is what is happening around them, where it is happening, and when. Because the author of the report is irrelevant to the information that is being shared, we do not collect any Personally Identifiable Information.
Does Helpmap collect any Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?
The core community reporting technologies developed by Helpmap are designed so that users do not need to provide their name, email address, telephone number, home address, or other identifying information simply to submit an incident report through the standard web interface. Helpmap is designed not to attach unnecessary personal identifiers to public incident report databases.
As with most online services, limited technical information may be processed for system operation, cybersecurity, spam prevention, fraud prevention, diagnostics, or abuse prevention. Separate activities—such as contacting Helpmap Agency, subscribing to communications, applying for a position, making a donation, participating in research, or using a third-party messaging platform—may require information necessary to provide those particular services. Those activities should be treated separately from public emergency reporting datasets.
Why minimize personal information?
Collecting data creates responsibility and risk. If personal information is unnecessary for the function a system is performing, there is no reason for Helpmap to collect it. Data minimization reduces privacy exposure, limits the consequences of unauthorized access, and helps prevent emergency information systems from becoming unnecessary systems of surveillance. Our objective is to understand conditions affecting communities, not to build profiles of the people reporting them.
Does Helpmap sell personal information?
No. Helpmap Agency does not collect or sell personal information. Community reporting, research, and adaptation technologies are intended to support preparedness, public understanding, emergency awareness, coordination, research, response, and recovery—not behavioral advertising or the creation of commercial identity profiles.
Does Helpmap track or profile people who submit community reports?
No. Helpmap's emergency reporting architecture is not designed to create profiles of individual reporters. Its purpose is shared awareness and collective decision-making: understanding conditions affecting a place or community. Where technical or security information must be processed, Helpmap seeks to limit it to what is absolutely necessary for the relevant function.
What about photographs submitted to Helpmap?
Photographs can provide valuable information about emergency conditions, but they can also reveal personal information unintentionally. Users of Helpmap reporting systems are therefore encouraged to avoid including identifiable faces, license plates, identification documents, private correspondence, computer screens, home addresses, or other unnecessary identifying details whenever reasonably possible. The purpose of an emergency photograph should be to document the condition or incident, not the identity of the people affected by it.
Does Helpmap use artificial intelligence?
Helpmap may use AI, machine-learning techniques, or automated computational systems for limited technical and infrastructure functions. These can include load balancing, resource allocation, scaling, routing, anomaly detection, security monitoring, system optimization, and other back-end operations needed to maintain reliable services during periods of high demand.
Does Helpmap use agentic AI or large language models to make emergency decisions?
No. Helpmap does not use agentic AI or large language models to independently interpret, verify, prioritize, publish, or act upon community emergency reports. Decisions about emergency information are not delegated to autonomous AI agents, and Helpmap does not rely on generative AI to determine whether an emergency exists, whether a community report is true, whether someone is safe, or what action a person should take. Automation can help operate infrastructure and keep backend workflows balanced and reliable, but it should not replace accountable human and institutional judgment in emergency decisions.
Why does Helpmap take this approach to AI?
Emergency communication requires accountability, context, and trust. Generative systems can produce plausible but incorrect information, while emergency conditions frequently involve ambiguity, incomplete information, rapidly changing circumstances, and serious consequences. Helpmap therefore distinguishes between using computational systems to make infrastructure more reliable and allowing autonomous systems to make substantive judgments about people's safety.
What does Helpmap mean by “open data”?
Some information produced through Helpmap deployments may be made available as open data under an applicable license. Open data can allow residents, researchers, emergency managers, journalists, humanitarian organizations, public agencies, and community groups to examine the same information, identify gaps, develop new tools, conduct research, and improve climate readiness.
Does open data mean personal information is public?
No. Open data and personal data are different things. Helpmap's objective is to make useful information about environmental conditions, hazards, and emergencies available where appropriate—not to create publicly accessible identity databases. This is another reason data minimization is important: the system should collect information necessary to understand an event without unnecessarily collecting information about the individual who reported it.
Can researchers use Helpmap data?
Where datasets are available for public or research use, researchers may be able to access them subject to the applicable data license, Terms of Use, privacy requirements, research agreements, or other conditions. Helpmap Agency actively works at the intersection of climate adaptation, public-interest technology, participatory research, and community knowledge, and welcomes responsible research partnerships.
Can governments and emergency managers use Helpmap information?
Yes, where appropriate. A central objective of community-led emergency mapping is to help different groups develop a clearer shared picture of conditions. Residents, community organizations, emergency managers, researchers, journalists, humanitarian groups, and governments may therefore work with overlapping information while retaining their different roles and responsibilities. The presence of community-generated information does not make Helpmap Agency an official government information source, nor does it replace authoritative government instructions.
How does Helpmap approach cybersecurity?
Our first security principle is data minimization: a system cannot expose personal information that it never collected. Helpmap seeks to minimize personal data in its core community- reporting workflows and to strictly separate information about incidents from any identity information. Security also requires protecting the infrastructure operating these systems. Open source code does not provide public access to Helpmap's production systems, administrative tools, credentials, databases, or other restricted operational resources. Cybersecurity is an ongoing process. No responsible organization can claim that an internet-connected system is completely immune from technical failure or attack, but we work tirelessly to address these challenges and protect all our users.
Is open source software less secure?
No. Open source software is not less secure because it is open source. Cybersecurity does not depend on hiding source code. Secure systems require sound architecture, configuration, access controls, responsible credential management, maintenance, monitoring, testing, and appropriate operational practices. Open source can also allow developers and researchers to inspect software, identify weaknesses, and contribute improvements.
What should I do if I identify a security or privacy issue?
Please report suspected vulnerabilities, exposed information, privacy problems, or other security concerns directly to Helpmap Agency rather than attempting to exploit them. Responsible usage helps us investigate potential problems while minimizing risk to users and infrastructure. Contact us to share your concern.
What does a Helpmap deployment involve?
A Helpmap deployment involves a lot more than software. Depending on the project, it might include: community consultation and participatory design; hazard and infrastructure research; localization of CogniCity OSS; integration of relevant public data; mapping and interface design; translation; training; user testing and public education; collaboration with emergency managers and other public institutions; communications and engagement campaigns; and, evaluation and continued improvement. The purpose is to integrate technology into the social and institutional environment where it will actually be used.
How does Helpmap choose where to work?
Helpmap Agency prioritizes communities facing significant climate and environmental risks, particularly where open source adaptation technology can strengthen existing local capacity. Projects also depend on local partnerships, community interest, technical feasibility, funding, institutional cooperation, and the ability to build a responsible long-term deployment. We do not believe adaptation technology should be imposed on a community from outside and our preference is to build carefully with a view to long-term integration.
Can my community work with Helpmap Agency?
Yes. Helpmap is designed to adapt to different communities, hazards, languages, infrastructures, and institutional contexts. Organizations interested in exploring a deployment can contact us. We are particularly interested in partnerships that bring together local knowledge, community participation, research, public institutions, and long-term stewardship.
Does Helpmap only work during disasters?
No. Emergency response is an important part of adaptation, but Helpmap's work spans readiness, chronic environmental risk, real-time emergency communication, response, recovery, research, public education, and long-term resilience. The same underlying infrastructure is designed to help communities understand both persistent environmental pressures and episodic emergency events.
What kinds of hazards can Helpmap technology address?
Deployments can be adapted to locally relevant conditions, including: wildfire; flooding; earthquakes; extreme heat; severe weather; storms and typhoons; air-quality hazards; infrastructure disruption; power and communications outages; and other locally defined environmental or emergency conditions. The categories used in any particular deployment should reflect the risks and priorities of the community using it.
Is every Helpmap deployment the same?
No. CogniCity OSS provides a common technological foundation but deployments are highly localized. Hazards, languages, interfaces, data sources, reporting channels, categories, public institutions, communications strategies, and community needs differ from place to place. A core principle of Helpmap Agency is that adaptation technology must respond to context rather than requiring communities to adapt themselves to a standardized product.
Does Helpmap work in multiple languages?
Yes. Multilingual and culturally appropriate communication is an important part of community-led adaptation. Language requirements are determined by the communities involved in each deployment, and localization involves more than literal translation: terminology, accessibility, communication practices, and local understandings of risk must also be considered.
Does Helpmap Agency conduct research?
Yes. Helpmap Agency continues to build on more than fifteen years of research, fieldwork, design, and collaboration around community-led disaster response and climate adaptation. Research remains integral to our work because environmental conditions, communication practices, technology, and community needs continue to change. Our research is oriented toward practical questions: how people understand risk, how information moves during emergencies, how communities coordinate, how technology can support collective intelligence, and how adaptation infrastructure can remain trustworthy and accessible.
Does Helpmap provide training?
Yes. Training and capacity building are important parts of Helpmap Agency's work. Open source technology only creates lasting public value if communities and organizations have the knowledge and capacity to understand, operate, adapt, and sustain it. Depending on the partnership, Helpmap Agency may therefore provide technical guidance, deployment support, workshops, documentation, training, mentorship, and related capacity-building activities.
Why does Helpmap combine technology with education and community engagement?
Technology cannot create trust by itself. An emergency platform can be technically sophisticated and still fail if communities do not understand it, institutions do not know how to use it, information is inaccessible, or the system does not respond to local practices and priorities. Education, participation, testing, communication, and long-term relationships are therefore part of our infrastructure, not secondary additions to it.
How is Helpmap Agency related to Helpmap Global Inc.?
Helpmap Agency and Helpmap Global Inc. are distinct organizations that collaborate on climate readiness and adaptation technology. Helpmap Agency focuses on nonprofit, community-led work including open-source stewardship, participatory design, public preparedness, research, education, community engagement, and pilot deployments. Helpmap Global Inc. develops related enterprise-level infrastructure to support government and institutional partners during implementation and operations. The two organizations are operationally and financially distinct but strategically aligned.
Why have both a nonprofit and a commercial organization?
The two organizations serve different but complementary purposes.
Helpmap Agency focuses on core climate readiness and adaptation priorities: keeping CogniCity OSS open and accessible, working with communities, conducting public interest research, testing new features, supporting participation and engagement, providing training, and developing deployments where commercial purchasing power may be limited.
Helpmap Global Inc. provides the technical expertise to manage enterprise infrastructure, technical operations, integrations, and service requirements when these are required by government agencies. Their collaboration allows nonprofit, public interest deployments to benefit from robust technical development, while protecting Helpmap Agency's independent, nonprofit mission.
Does Helpmap Global Inc. control Helpmap Agency?
No. Helpmap Agency and Helpmap Global Inc. are separate organizations with distinct governance, executive boards, finances, responsibilities, and institutional capacities. They collaborate when doing so advances their aligned goals in climate adaptation, but Helpmap Agency remains solely responsible for its nonprofit mission and activities.
How is Helpmap Agency funded?
As a nonprofit organization, Helpmap Agency supports its work through a combination of philanthropic support, grants, donations, institutional partnerships, and other mission-aligned funding. Funding allows us to develop and maintain open-source technology, undertake research, conduct pilots, work with communities, provide training, and make adaptation infrastructure available in places where resources may otherwise be limited.
Can I support Helpmap Agency?
Yes. Individuals, foundations, institutions, and other supporters can contribute to Helpmap Agency’s work. Financial support helps maintain CogniCity OSS as an open public resource and allows the Agency to work with communities facing increasingly urgent climate and environmental risks. Please use the current donation information on the Helpmap Agency website for the applicable donation process and any information concerning tax treatment.
Can an organization fund a particular project or community?
Potentially. Helpmap Agency works with philanthropic organizations, institutions, public agencies, universities, community organizations, and other partners to develop mission-aligned projects. Organizations interested in supporting a specific deployment, research initiative, geographic region, or area of adaptation work can contact Helpmap Agency to discuss potential partnerships.
Does funding determine the information shown on Helpmap platforms?
No. Our objective is to maintain the integrity of community-led information infrastructure regardless. Of course, funders and partners can make projects possible, but funding does not convert community reporting into advertising, behavioral profiling, political messaging, or proprietary control of public-interest data. Any deployment must remain consistent with Helpmap Agency's mission, applicable agreements, privacy commitments, and responsibility to the communities involved.
Who works at Helpmap Agency?
Helpmap Agency brings together researchers, designers, technologists, emergency management professionals practitioners, educators, community organizers, and collaborators working across climate adaptation, disaster response, civic technology, urban research, open-source development, and participatory design. The interdisciplinary nature of our reflects the nature of the problem: adaptation cannot be meaningfully addressed by any discipline or profession on its own.
Why is the team interdisciplinary?
Climate emergencies cut across infrastructure, environment, technology, institutions, communication, public health, social networks, and everyday community life. Building useful adaptation systems requires that technical expertise is balanced by design, research, communication, education, and lived experience. Helpmap Agency brings these perspectives together so deployments can be technically reliable while remaining understandable, accessible, and locally meaningful.
Where is Helpmap Agency based?
Helpmap Agency is based in Montréal, Canada, and works internationally through partnerships, deployments, research, and collaborations. Our technologies are designed to be adapted locally rather than tied to a single geographic context.
Who does Helpmap Agency work with?
Our partners can include:
– residents and community groups;
– grassroots and civil-society organizations;
– researchers and universities;
– schools and educators;
– emergency managers;
– humanitarian organizations;
– public agencies and governments;
– designers and technologists;
– journalists and media organizations;
– foundations and philanthropic organizations; and,
– other groups involved in adaptation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
The exact partnership structure depends on the needs of each project.
Can universities and researchers collaborate with Helpmap?
Yes. Universities and researchers can contribute to participatory research, climate and hazard analysis, data methods, design, evaluation, public education, technology development, and other dimensions of adaptation. We are particularly interested in research partnerships that produce practical public value and respect the knowledge and agency of participating communities.
Can governments partner with Helpmap Agency?
Yes. Helpmap Agency can work with local, regional, and national governments while remaining an independent nonprofit organization. Public-sector collaboration can help connect community-generated information with emergency management, preparedness, infrastructure planning, research, and other institutional systems.
Can grassroots organizations without technical expertise work with Helpmap?
Yes. Local expertise does not mean software expertise. Community organizations contribute knowledge about places, people, communication practices, vulnerabilities, networks, priorities, histories, and existing forms of mutual aid that our technical staff cannot infer from data. Helpmap's role is to make the technology respond to that knowledge—not to require local organizations to become software engineers.
How does Helpmap build trust?
Trust cannot be added to a platform after it is built. It must be developed through transparency, participation, reliable technology, clear communication, responsible data practices, local partnerships, and accountability when problems occur. Our commitment to open source, data minimization, participatory design, and community-led deployment reflects this approach.
Can Helpmap guarantee that all the information on the platform is accurate?
No. Community-generated information can be extremely valuable, particularly during rapidly changing emergencies, but any individual report may be mistaken, incomplete, outdated, delayed, or incorrectly located. Official data can also be delayed or revised. The Helpmap platform is meant to contribute to shared awareness, not to become an exclusive source for decision making.
Should people rely on Helpmap instead of official emergency information?
No. Helpmap technologies are designed to complement and corroborate other sources of information. Official evacuation orders, warnings, emergency alerts, and instructions from competent public authorities always take precedence. If emergency assistance is required, contact the appropriate emergency service directly.
How can I work with Helpmap Agency?
Organizations interested in community deployments, research partnerships, public-sector collaboration, education, training, philanthropic support, design, technology, or other forms of cooperation can contact Helpmap Agency through our website. We are particularly interested in collaborations that strengthen local capacity for long-term, inclusive, accessible climate readiness.
How can I contribute to the open-source work?
Developers, researchers, designers, practitioners, and organizations can explore CogniCity OSS and participate subject to its applicable open-source licenses and contribution processes. Open-source stewardship depends on a wider community of people willing to inspect, test, document, deploy, improve, and sustain shared technology.
How can I learn more?
You can learn more about Helpmap Agency, our team, CogniCity OSS, current projects, partnerships, research, and ways to support us by joining our mailing list. Our objective is to help build a global commons for climate adaptation: open technologies, shared knowledge, trusted relationships, and community capacity that allow people to prepare, respond, recover, and care for one another as environmental conditions change.
