By Army Staff Sgt. Leah Kilpatrick 3rd Brigade Combat Team,
1st Cavalry Division
FORT HOOD, Texas, October 29, 2015 — 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.
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