An offline app built by volunteers became a key tool for first responders during the earthquake response in Venezuela. On the second day after the earthquake, Anton went down to what everyone had started calling ground zero, the hardest-hit area. He'd been helping in Caracas before, but now he was heading into a zone with no cell coverage. He didn't have to improvise: he already had the app on his phone.

"Co Maps turned out to be really useful for me because I entered a zone with no coverage and needed it right away," Anton recalls. A few days later, he joined as a volunteer with a rescue team that had come from El Salvador, firefighters, Civil Protection, several different rescue units, operating remotely, taking instructions from a command center back in their home country. Most of the team didn't know Co Maps. Only one person had access to a map and was guiding the rest. Anton started helping with logistics: when the command center asked to move the team from one point to another, he was the one who could find the destination, if it was mapped at all.

Along the way, he discovered that the team's map coordinator was using a different, much more limited navigation app, one that didn't carry the detail that comes from a community of volunteers mapping a place, or the ability to work fully offline in a zone with no signal. When Anton showed him Co Maps, it was, in his words, "a discovery he loved making." That's the kind of moment that made us want to hear the fuller story. So we sat down with Anton Wenemoser and Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, co-founders of Co Maps, to talk about how the app was used during the Venezuela earthquake activation, and how a collaboration between the Humanitarian Open Street Map (HOT) and Co Maps came together in real time.