San Francisco has 67 Emergency Drinking fountains marked with a blue water drop, designated to provide drinking water in the event of a disaster.

 

However, awareness about these hydrants is very low. SF city published a PDF listing of hydrants, but did not make it otherwise available.

 

Hey Cycle is a web app that scrapes this site you probably have never heard of http://www.freecycle.org/ (it’s like craigslist but all items are free) that allows users to save time and effort of having to repeatedly check this site for the items that they are looking for. So, we basically made a better interface that allows users to receive messages on the items that they are interested in receiving rather than having to come back numinous times to check up on what they need. This is what we made. Please view this site in Google Chrome Browsers only! We only had 14 hours and 5 people to make this from nothing: http://heycycle.appspot.com/ How does this help humanity? Well the answer is it’s a 3-way win for people and the planet. 1. People want to get rid of good working items as to not through them away and fill up landfills. 2. People who need free things. 3. The planet who does not want any more garbage in landfills, CO2 emissions from materials used to mine, produce, ship and receive new products. the PPT (including team members) can be found: http://heycycle.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/HeyCycle_RHoK_Presentation.ppt

SMS Interface to Google Person Finder. Google Person Finder is an amazing service that can help save lives in towns, cities, and countries struck by disasters. Unfortunately, it relies on these people having access to devices and internet infrastructure that are easily compromised or destroyed during a disaster. SMS PersonFinder allows any of the 4.5 billion people with a phone in their pocket to interface, search, and report to the Google Person Finder database increasing the accessibility of Person Finder to a global level. Find usage and try it out now at: http://smspersonfinder.appspot.com/

Live at http://foodmovr.appspot.com/

Food excess is an inescapable part of life. Unfortunately, most of it goes to waste, while people nearby are hungry. Our app connects people with excess food to those who are lacking (like Airbnb for food).

Potential users include:

• A caterer at a wedding. After the event ends, she notices that there is extra lasagna that will be thrown away. She uses her phone to register the food on FoodMovr. A nearby foodbank is notified, and sends someone over to pick up the excess food.


• Google has many cafeterias at its offices. They are able to predict that they will have extra food at regular intervals. They create a repeating posting, advertising this extra food to groups that can make use of it.


• A grocery store owner in a city that has suffered from a disaster knows that his perishable food will go bad soon without electricity to power refrigerators. Rather than let it go to waste, he posts a notice on FoodMovr, and people in the neighborhood come by to pick it up.

There are some potential legal issues involved. To avoid liability, FoodMovr may require that food producers have a food handling license, or are somehow accredited. Also, producers may wish to deal with larger organizations, like food banks, rather than a bunch of random individuals.

We have an open API with documentation.

Our current implementation is just short of a minimum viable product. It would need more front end polish to be feasible to launch.

Android repo

Slides

Volunteers create profiles containing their skills, location and availability. NGO's can search volunteers based on location and skill set.

A tool for matching volunteers/experts with opportunities to help. It is geography-aware and capable (provided an adequate SMS gateway) of communicating in real time through text messages. It's easy to deploy (runs on Google App Engine), scales well, and is easy to understand and modify (it's written in Python using the tipfy stack). Source-code is kept on github, easy to fork and under a free license. The prototype is deployed on http://rhokbush.appspot.com/