Community Action Response Information Network (CARIN)

I returned from Colombia in February 2020 just as COVID-19 was beginning to roll across the globe.

Within a few weeks, Marc Pierson and I were already talking with people involved in nonprofits, community organizations, and resilience work about what might be useful to build.

There was enormous uncertainty. It was not clear which institutions would continue operating normally, where resources would be available, or how communities would coordinate if existing infrastructure became overwhelmed.

Organizations including the Resilience System and the Whatcom Family & Community Network were already thinking about community resilience, information sharing, and local capacity. The question that interested us was what useful infrastructure might look like at the neighborhood level.

CARIN, the Community Action Response and Information Network, grew out of that period.

The idea was relatively simple: give communities a shared place to exchange local information, identify needs and available resources, coordinate volunteers, and maintain some ability to organize when larger systems were unpredictable.

Our team built a web platform around place-specific community dashboards. It incorporated mapping with OpenStreetMap, membership and visibility controls, local resource information, volunteer coordination, messaging, calendars, forums, and administrative tools intended to make the system usable by community organizations without substantial technical expertise.

We moved quickly because the situation seemed to demand it, and, thankfully, the world moved faster than we did.

CARIN never became the large community network we imagined. COVID was serious, but our community ultimately did not face the kind of disruption that would have made a resource like CARIN indispensable. Adoption remained limited, and I learned that building the software was only one part of the harder problem of creating a functioning social system around it.

Even so, CARIN was foundational work for me. It was my first sustained attempt to combine systems thinking, interface design, software, geography, organizational structure, and an immediate real-world problem.

The work was later recognized with the Ken Gass Community Builder Award.

A number of the ideas and relationships around CARIN continued into the web and organizational systems work that followed.