Today, almost everything
is on the Internet, and mobile devices place that immense collection of
knowledge in the palms of our hands.
But not everything is
online -- or at least much of it isn’t readily accessible -- so one
noncommissioned officer is using the power of the Internet to help soldiers.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Ronnie
Russell, mortar platoon sergeant with Headquarters and Headquarters Company,
1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, develops mobile applications to provide
troops and their families with tools to help them navigate their duty stations
and surrounding communities.
About 15 years ago, while
stationed in South Korea, Russell struggled to get from one place to another in
the foreign country. It was an irritating reality that Russell said he just
became accustomed to over time. Russell recalled that experience when he
returned to South Korea last year with the Charger Battalion for a rotational
deployment. He was shocked, he said, that there were still very few resources
to help soldiers navigate the local area.
“There was nothing being
done about it, except through each area’s publication, so I didn’t like that,”
said Russell, a Fayetteville, North Carolina, native. “So I said, ‘Let me try
making an app.’ The app was really for my soldiers, because they were new. Korea
was not new to me.”
After getting the
runaround from a couple of mobile application developers, Russell said, he took
matters into his own hands.
“I was like, ‘Well, I’ll
teach myself,’ so I went on Google,” he said. “I tell people now, ‘I went to
Google University, and my professor’s name was YouTube.’ That is who taught
me.”
One-Stop Shop
The app, called Penn
Around, serves as a mobile one-stop shop stocked with all the resources a soldier
assigned to South Korea might need. Penn Around consolidates a variety of
information under one umbrella, Russell said.
“When the app first
started, it started small,” said Army Sgt. Melvin Dizon, fire direction
computer check assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1-12 Cav. “It
was basically the bus schedules of all the camps. That helped, since being
1-12, we weren’t from Korea. It was the best thing that was out at the time to
help soldiers who were transitioning figure out where to go.”
Inside the roughly 13-megabyte
file are resources ranging from bus schedules and military lodging information to
MyPay, taxis and exchange vendors.
And the response has been
positive.
The app has more than
5,000 downloads and an average rating of 4.4 stars out of 5. “Very convenient
app,” one reviewer wrote. “It provides access to all the bus schedules as well
as keeps me up to date with what’s going on.”
Dizon said that Russell
put care, thought and the concerns of his soldiers into the development of this
resource.
“Sergeant Russell
approached each member of our platoon, because he said he was going to start an
app to help soldiers transition and get around Korea,” Dizon said. “He took
ideas from every soldier in our platoon, so whatever ideas we first pitched to
him, he added that to the initial app when it first came out. Ever since then,
it actually evolved. Now it has the SHARP program on it. It has the movie
times. Whatever you needed as a soldier out there, it eventually ended up on
the app.”
Off-Duty Time
Russell spent a lot of his
off-duty time ensuring he was going through all the right channels and getting
permission from all the right people at every step of the way -- a lot of work
for a noncommissioned officer who simply wanted to help his soldiers learn how
to traverse the Korean Peninsula.
Russell’s concern for the
welfare of others didn’t stop there.
The single father sought
information about safe neighborhoods in which to rear his son. This quest for
knowledge grew into “Tx Corral,” another mobile app that serves as a tool to
keep citizens informed of what’s going on in their neighborhood and in
neighboring towns.
It taps into the social
media feeds of various law enforcement agencies and provides access to services
that contact nearby cab companies and tow trucks using the GPS location from
the user’s phone.
Russell dedicated a lot of
time to traveling throughout Central Texas to obtain permission from the
various agencies involved to use their information.
Having tackled Central
Texas and the Land of the Morning Calm, Russell is currently working on
prototype apps for U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Army Japan.
In all of the programs he is
working on, Russell said, he considers what is important and relevant to the soldiers
at that specific assignment. What is a priority for soldiers in Hawaii isn’t
necessarily what’s important to soldiers in South Korea, and vice versa, he
explained.
As the apps are all free
to download, there is no monetary gain for Russell. But he does get the
satisfaction of knowing he may have helped a soldier answer the same questions
he once had.