The Watch Duty smartphone app has increasingly become a resource for people to follow real-time updates on California wildfires. Interest in the app surged this month as the Mosquito Fire has burned in El Dorado and Placer counties, data from Google Trends shows. Last week, KCRA 3’s Joseph Daniels spoke to the app’s co-founder and CEO John Clarke Mills about why the tech executive started Watch Duty and what its mission is. Mills said that the app relies on information from a team of people who have been listening to fire and police scanner radio transmissions for years in California. Here’s how Watch Duty explains its mission on its website: “When a wildfire ignites we are automatically notified and start gathering information from a wide variety of public sources including local, state, and federal fire frequencies, satellite and infrared flight data, fixed and aerial imagery, and more.”The Watch Duty team then works to validate, organize and share that information as early as possible. Mills stressed that the app should not be considered a substitute for emergency alert systems like Nixle. “It’s important to listen to your officials,” he said. Here is more of what to know about the app and its co-founder. How did the Watch Duty App come to be? Mills: “I started Watch Duty in 2021 after living through the Walbridge fire in 2020 in Sonoma County and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to find the information that I wanted outside of Facebook and Twitter and so that’s where real-time citizens were updating information about wildland fire activity via police and radio scanners. And so I decided to find those folks, convince them that we were going to do the right thing and it would be a citizen-directed emergency alert system.”What has been the response to the app from authorities? Mills: “It depends which type of authority you are talking about. Ultimately, most people really enjoy what we are doing. I’d say about 99% of people are happy about it. Some government agencies are struggling to figure out how to deal with us. But we are trying to work together with them. But ultimately it’s their job to disseminate this information. What we’re very clear about with our users is you should be subscribing to your Nixle alerts and other things as well. God forbid, our system does not work. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s important for us to play nice with the authorities. We’re not here telling anybody to evacuate. We’re the ones who are letting you know more information in real-time to make informed decisions. So firefighters love it. Oftentimes, the people who are in charge of communications do not.”What has been the response to the app since the Mosquito Fire? Mills: “The response is amazing. We get love letters every day on Facebook and Twitter and email and people feel that they are now being informed about more activity, more detail, more often. It allows people to not have to go browse things…we’re doing all that work anyway. We might as well share what we’re doing. The overwhelming comment that we get is less PTSD, less trauma, less stress and that’s what we’re really here for.”The app is user-generated. Can you touch upon what that means? Mills: “A lot of the people that we work with, men and women across California, and our most famous from New Zealand, the CA fire scanner, are all people who have been listening to radios for five years or more and relaying this information on Twitter and Facebook. What we did is we found all these people across the internet, convinced them all that we were going to do the right thing, and got them on this platform. So getting it up and running was not an engineering challenge. It was a community challenge. We needed to get everyone to believe that we are doing the right thing. We are a nonprofit, nongovernment-funded organization that is here to disseminate the truth. What happens is those folks are all collaborating in Slack constantly, which is our messaging platform. It allows them in real-time to communicate with each other and make sure that they’re going to be releasing the right information. “What is the vetting process like? Mills: “The vetting process is easy because they have been doing this for a very long time. We don’t usually pick up strangers. These are people who have been the eyes and ears for their community for a long time. It’s really not that hard to do. Once we go into less densely populated areas, that might prove challenging. But for now, there are dozens of people in California who all do this for the neighbors and community. They’re easy to find.” What plans are there to expand the app to states outside California? Mills: “We will continue to go deeper in the areas we live at. We have a lot more features that we haven’t released yet. We just released an air quality index today. In the future, we will be releasing wind and other weather behaviors. And then there are other disasters; this is not just about fire. There are floods and mudslides and all sorts of other activities like earthquakes. We’re going to focus on disasters not just fires. … Right now it is slow and steady. This is not a move-fast-and-break-things situation. We cannot go down. We cannot have issues. It's critical that we move quickly, but in a steadfast manner because people trust us and we cannot lose that trust.”Anything else that people should know about Watch Duty? Mills: “It’s important that citizens understand that although we let you know early and often, it’s important to listen to your officials and use their applications like Nixle and others as a belt and suspenders type of situation. We relay that in our app as well, but God forbid, it’s nice to know and be reminded of danger and you should listen to your government as best you can. We will just let you know earlier when it’s happening.”