Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories, a very special episode of App Stories, in fact.

Today's episode is brought to you by Gentleestriek, a former ADA winner itself and

Opencase. I'm John Vorhees and with me is my co-host Federico Vitici. Hey Federico. Hello. We're in

person. We are in person. We haven't done this in a very long time. It's been a couple of years in

fact since we've been together in a studio. We've seen each other. Two years ago in another podcast studio.

That's exactly right. Right here in Cooper Tino. We are at Apple Park. Thank you very much to the people at Apple who have invited us here to do some interviews with ADA Award winners.

We have for our first two guests today, John Mills and Dave Merritt, their app is

Watch Duty and it was the app winner for Social Impact. Welcome to the show. Thank you for

having us. It's great to have you. I want to start off today's conversation by kind of rolling

the clock back to where watch duties started.

Like what was the origin of it? What was the impetus for creating the app?

Yeah, I live in Northern California now in Sonoma County. And I spent many years in Silicon Valley,

but I left five years ago. And after getting out there, I experienced multiple fires

extraordinarily close to my property with very little warning or notification. So after you have that

happened multiple times and finally one fire was about 50,000 acres and that one I evacuated

to all places, Fountain Grove, which burned in 2017, to a friend's house.

And I spent day and night listening to the fire radio scanners trying to figure out where the

information was.

And so that was the impetus, really, figuring out how this happened, realizing it was my

community members and neighbors who spent all night on Facebook and Twitter disseminating

this information because the government wasn't keeping up.

And that's really where this all came from.

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