Meet Johan Michalove, the PhD Student Who Created an Interactive Mutual Aid Map for L.A.

The technologist, writer, and researcher Johan Michalove responded to the horrifying news of the L.A fires by mobilizing the efforts of Mutual Aid Los Angeles’ spreadsheet into a live, mobile-friendly interactive map (and app). The 30-year old Cornell PhD student started working on the tool the day after the fires broke out on January 8th, resulting in Fireaid.info, which aggregates a large number of available resources and ways to volunteer, but makes the information easy to filter and continuously updates the status, availability and needs of each listing. “The way that I see it is that we live in a world where we really have to be able to help each other,” he explained. “And that’s what the map does: helps people give and receive aid.” Michalove generously took a few minutes out of his day to tell me a little bit about how he made the app, the role of technology in community organizing, and why the city’s eventual rebuild presents an opportunity to forge a safer and more equitable future.

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EMILY SANDSTROM: Last Tuesday, the fires broke out. Where were you? What was your immediate reaction?

JOHAN MICHALOVE: I think I started seeing all these firsthand images of the fires on Twitter and on Instagram. And the first thought I had was giving me vivid flashbacks to when I was in Australia during the Black Summer of 2019 and 2020. I was in Canberra and we were under an evac order. The AQI [Air Quality Index] was like, 700, like really toxic. And I was just like, “Oh, wow. I know the same thing is going down in L.A.”

SANDSTROM: Yeah. So how did you start working with Mutual Aid LA and decide to mobilize their resources into an interactive map?

MICHALOVE: Basically, I saw the Mutual Aid LA resource on Instagram like most people and I was like, “This is incredible. It’s so thorough and comprehensive, and they’re vetting the resources and everything.” But I was also like, “If I were on the go or in an emergency, trying to navigate a little spreadsheet on my phone would be impossible.” So I actually just started pulling the data and building the map because I kind of thought, “Oh, Mutual Aid LA is probably super busy. They have a lot on their plate. I can just build this as a layer on top of their information.” So as soon as Mutual Aid LA puts something on their spreadsheet, it updates on the app. And right now, there’s actually so many other spreadsheets. I’m in a signal channel and there’s dozens of people and they all have different spreadsheets. There’s spreadsheets for translation needs and language justice.

SANDSTROM: Wow.

MICHALOVE: So I’m kind of working on how we can get more of those spreadsheets onto the app. That’s what I’ve been spending time on. I’m in awe of Mutual Aid LA’s organization. They run such a tight ship.

SANDSTROM: Do you see this as the next frontier in community organizing, especially with the bleak future it seems we’ll have to navigate?

MICHALOVE: The way that I see it is that we live in a world where we really have to be able to help each other, and I think people want to volunteer and donate and exchange goods and know when there’s an opportunity to do that. And that’s what the map does: helps people give and receive aid. So I think that will definitely exist well beyond the current crisis, and we’re learning a lot about how to build systems that can help people help each other out.

SANDSTROM: Something that occurred to me was that so many of these efforts are being spearheaded by ordinary people who have the skillset, but they’re not really being pioneered by city government.

MICHALOVE: I think you’re onto something that’s really, really important about this moment, which is that my friends and I, we often talk about para-institutions, parallel institutions, and these are essentially organized entities that exist outside of the institutions as we know them. We have para-universities where people go and study, but it’s not a university.

SANDSTROM: Right.

MICHALOVE: And we have all these different para-institutions that are providing service to people now when the government is not really able to mobilize in the same way or at the same speed.

SANDSTROM: Are you on the political side of this as well? Have you been thinking about the failures of our governing institutions?

MICHALOVE: I mean, I kind of operate on the principle that all software is political. And in a way, the map that I’m building is a political statement. It’s trying to say that we need to be able to help each other and not wait around for services to show up.

SANDSTROM: Do you have feelings more broadly about how tech will be leveraged in the future to help communities organize amongst themselves?

MICHALOVE: Yeah. I think there’s a world in which we build technology that allows for deeper solidarity and technology that helps people find common ground against differences. And I think this tool is kind of doing that because it’s saying: “Here’s a map, here’s an emergency in a context that we all share, and here’s how we can work together.” So it’s really about building technology that brings people together in some way.

SANDSTROM: I’m blown away by it. To return to the fires, two camps seem to have emerged. One is saying, “This is a climate catastrophe.” And the other is attributing it to the specific ecology of Los Angeles. People have made whole careers out of saying that one day the winds are going to blow and burn it down. What do you make of that?

MICHALOVE: I mean, I see it as two sides of the same coin, which is the fact that humans haven’t really understood that they live on a planet that operates on its own principles, so they build in places and they build ecologies where they don’t belong. And when they have done that, they don’t plan for the inevitable catastrophe, because every catastrophe or crisis is really a planning issue. We didn’t fund the fire department and that’s part of the trouble. But I think there’s a deeper, almost philosophical aspect to this, which is that L.A. was built with a ton of hubris, and that’s the same thinking that has brought about climate change. So in a sense, it’s all the same thing, and we aren’t attentive to living on the planet.

SANDSTROM: What do you imagine this rebuilding effort will look like?

MICHALOVE: I think it’s a huge opportunity to bring about some of the best and brightest architects that we have and build something that’s beautiful and sustainable and affordable. It’s kind of like a blank slate to build something that could be very utopian—if people are organized and they decide that they want to actually build a place to live that’s beautiful and walkable and built around more urbanist principles. I’d like to believe that if people organize and say, “This is my land and I want to create a place for my children where they can live safely, and we have the architectural means, we know how to work with materials, we know how to build differently,” then it’s a huge opportunity to do a grand experiment. What does it mean to build without the hubris that got us here in the first place?

SANDSTROM: Thank you for instilling some sense of optimism in me. Is there anything else that sticks out to you in terms of resource-gathering? Anything you’ve seen that’s really struck you?

MICHALOVE: I think one of the things that’s a huge source of inspiration for me is that there’s a big movement towards language justice in organizing. I’m in a group chat with people who are really attentive to that as we’re rolling out these peer services. It has to be multilingual, because in L.A. you have all these communities that don’t speak English or where English isn’t their primary language. So  the fact that people are organizing just on the level of language alone is really cool. And that kind of inspired me to build a feature on the map, which actually live-translates all the resources into 17 different languages. And that’s using AI, because it has to be able to scale. But it’s also, to me, one of the more promising cases of building with AI.

SANDSTROM: How did you learn to do this? Did you do it all by yourself?

MICHALOVE: Yeah, I’ve done the whole thing on my own.

SANDSTROM: Wow.

MICHALOVE: There’s been a recent development in technology that’s helped me a lot. They’re called AI agents, and I’ve been using an agent to kind of help me build the system and work together in an almost symbiotic dance where we look at the code together, we figure out blueprints for how we want to architect different features, and then we lay things out systematically and then debug and build. It’s really allowed me to build stuff that I wouldn’t have known how to do otherwise because the AI is kind of acting as an extension of what I want to do.

SANDSTROM: That’s so cool.

MICHALOVE: I’ve been thinking of the best metaphor for describing the experience of working with a machine like that, and it’s kind of riding a motorcycle at high speed. You kind of have to dodge, because AI isn’t perfect, so it’ll mess up. And then you have to catch its errors and give it feedback. You’re kind of always on your toes, but if you get it right, you can do a lot more quickly.

SANDSTROM: That’s so awesome. My final question is, what has the response been to this app? 

MICHALOVE I’m not on the ground, so I don’t get to see as much. But from friends in L.A., they’ve all said really positive things about it. Technical people I’ve talked to have said that it seems like one of the only legitimate places to go, even though I feel like there are many great resources out there. There are features on there that are using collective intelligence to enhance it, and I think your readers ought to know about them if they want to use the map. The first one is the input form; if you fill out the form, it’s a little green button at the top, then it’ll live appear on the map. And it has an expiration for your pin, so even if you’re doing something very small, like going to sort donated items, you could do that. And then the other feature is called updates, and that’s for people who are on the ground, who maybe went to a distribution center and they really need hygiene products. They can put an update and then everyone will see, “Oh, this place needs hygiene products.”

SANDSTROM: So you anticipate being approached by city government? It seems insane that they don’t have a tool like this.

MICHALOVE: It’s a good question. I mean, I’m totally open to having conversations on how we can partner. I’m kind of working with different technical platforms to integrate with them. So yeah, I’m down to have that chat, but I haven’t heard from the city yet.