Ping is an initiative of Ushahidi, a Kenya-based non-profit building technology for global good.

Ping was borne out of the anxious days following the Westgate mall seige that rocked Nairobi.

http://www.rt.com/news/nairobi-siege-hostages-kenya-209/

Most of our team members call Nairobi home and we met together to discuss issues around the seige -- and what we could do to help.

One issue we all strongly shared was the hard time we had in checking in with each other.

So we built Ping.

the Ping app:

group check-ins during an emergency

“Ping” is basically a binary, multichannel check-in tool for groups

Ping is a responsive, cloud-based dashboard that allows users to send and check the status of their pings in real-time.

Pings are sent via traditional email and SMS channels so there's no requirements for smartphones or a type of device, application, or operating system. It just works

Ping is currently in a private alpha 

• You create a list of your people (family, organization), and each person also adds another contact who is close to them (spouse, roommate, boy/girlfriend, etc).
   
• When a disaster happens, you send out a message for everyone to check-in. The admin sends out a 120 character message that always has “are you ok?” appended to the end.
   
• This goes out via text message and email (more channels can be added later).

• The message goes out three times, once every 5 minutes. If there is a response, then that person is considered okay. If no response, then 3 messages get sent to their other contact.

• We file each response into one of 3 areas: responded (verified), not responded, not okay.
   
• Every message that comes back from someone in that group is saved into a big bucket of text, that the admin can add notes to if needed.

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THE MOCKUP

https://github.com/ushahidi/pingapp