Listening to the news from Haiti this morning, I learned that search and rescue efforts are being hampered by a lack of bulldozers and other equipment for clearing rubble and extract trapped people. The damaged airport there is overwhelmed with planes trying to bring in supplies and people to help so the likelihood of airlifting a bunch of bulldozers in time is low.

It occurred to me that a compact device to serve as a surrogate bulldozer would be really useful. Something a little bigger than the famous "jaws of life", with lots of flexibility for different situations, and lots of provisions for working in the field where tools, parts, and machining equipment are scarce. Ideally such a device would fit on a palette for easier loading onto a cargo plane, and could be loaded onto a vehicle as small as a pickup truck for deployment.

The open source model has always been an effective way to develop software, and increasingly hardware. There are tons of hardware tinkerers who do things like build working R2D2 droids, or Stirling engines, who might welcome the opportunity to build something really important.