Furkan Kılıç and Eser Özvataf woke up in Istanbul on the morning of February 6 to news of the earthquake that left large areas of southeastern Turkey and western Syria in ruins. The scenes of destruction were overwhelming at first. “We were devastated by what was happening in our country,” says Kılıç. “It was difficult to understand what had happened.”

But soon the two men got to work. Kılıç is the founding engineer and Özvataf the CTO of software startup Datapad. Both are well-known members of the Turkish tech scene – Özvataf was previously director of engineering at Getir, Turkey’s premier decacorn – and between them they have almost three decades of industry experience. They began mobilizing their colleagues on Twitter, and within hours they formed a rapid response movement, simply dubbed the Earthquake Help Project, putting the technology to work for NGOs and relief teams on the ground.

By Monday morning, they had set up a Discord channel to organize workflows; As of Tuesday, they had 15,000 developers, designers, project managers and others around the world building apps, including those that help locate people in distress and distribute help where it’s needed.

“There were so many people who wanted to help,” says Kılıç. “It’s difficult for anyone to balance their daily life and their daily work, because everyone wants to try to help as much as possible. »

More than 11,000 people are believed to have been killed in the 7.8-magnitude quake, which struck early in the morning, and a 7.5-magnitude aftershock hours later. The UN has warned that the actual toll could reach 20,000 deaths. Turkey has declared a state of emergency for three months as local services struggle to recover from the tragedy.

Rescuers are still searching for survivors beneath the collapsed buildings, but the search has been hampered by snow, rain and extreme cold.

One of the Earthquake Help Project’s first tools was an app that scours social media to find calls for help and then geotags them, displaying them on a heat map so responders can see where they’re focused. The team also created portals and apps that aggregate support offers, collect information for affected people about what to do and who to contact, and allow people to report whether they are safe or they need help.