Our team is committed to creating adaptation technology that fosters trust and strengthens communities.
HelpMap builds adaptation technology that strengthens the capacity of people, government agencies, and civic institutions to care for one another when it matters most. Our team spans emergency management, design, research, software development, and community engagement, united by one shared belief: in a crisis, information should bring people together—not leave them behind. We design adaption technology that is open, reliable, and human-centered because the challenges ahead demand infrastructure that allows everyone to work together.
HelpMap brings together practitioners with deep experience in climate adaptation, humanitarian technology, open-source governance, and community co-design. We work collaboratively, iteratively, and with humility—because adaptation is collective, and real progress happens when expertise is shared across sectors and borders.
Board of Directors
Etienne Turpin
Founder
Corrina Bachtiar
Board Chair
Alessandra Renzi
Board Member
Brock Baker
Board Member
Working Together
We build technology for the world we share, and we want to work with everyone committed to building safer, more resilient futures. That includes governments, humanitarian agencies, researchers, utilities, news organizations, and— always—community members themselves. Adaptation requires trust, open standards, and collaboration across boundaries.
If you’re working to protect people and the environment, strengthen preparedness, or coordinate response, we’d love to work with you. Together, we can design systems that not only respond to crises—but reduce harm, restore confidence, and deepen the trust that holds communities together.
Founder’s story
HelpMap Global has grown from the belief that communities are strongest when they can reliably and efficiently help each other. Our founder, Dr. Etienne Turpin, has spent his career building tools for people to help each other in tough times. Originally trained as a philosopher, he began teaching theory to designers; later, as a Research Scientist at MIT, he co-designed CogniCity OSS, one of the most successful and widely adopted systems for crowdsourcing ever deployed.*
Whether Etienne was working in ultra-dense megacities like or remote rural villages, he noticed a similar pattern: when a crisis hits, people genuinely want to help one another—but they need better ways to connect. Etienne built HelpMap Global to close this gap.
*In 2020, the M+ Museum for Visual Culture in Hong Kong acquired the source code for CogniCity OSS for its permanent collection of 21st century urban design and commissioned the film The Same River, Twice, in which Etienne narrates the history of its design and adoption by users in South and Southeast Asia.
