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Community-driven crisis alerts for bushfires ( BushfireConnect.org)

Submitted by Keren on May 29, 2011 - 23:45
Revision #10ForkRecommend a Solution
Australia

Bushfire Connect is an online bushfire crisis service based on Ushahidi, and started at RHOK in 2010. It displays and manages real time emergency information submitted by local community members and emergency agencies. Our goal is to establish a reliable, dynamic and timely resource for people in fire threatened or damaged areas to enhance and extend the utility of official data sources.  The needs of BushfireConnect are unique in the fact that we are a long term project (which has special challenges when it comes to moderator support) covering an entire continent.

Recommended Solutions: 
Automatic location detection for Bushfire Connect
Full screen map and integration of categories for Bushfire Connect
Increased Usability for Bushfire Connect
Example: 
We ran a trial earlier this year in Healesville where the community did a re-enactment of Black Saturday. The trial was a great success with people verifying there was a real need for a tool to enable them to quickly and easily share information about bushfires with their neighbours.
User Stories: 
A person in a bushfire prone area can subscribe to receive alerts (for free) by SMS or email. They can also get a smartphone app that will feature community driven up-dates.

Alerts add by people will be moderated and selected alerts will be distributed to subscribed users by SMS.

The end goal is to significantly reduce the time delay in providing critical information to people who's lives and property are in danger.

Constraints: 
The main constraints exist around the cost of SMS in addition to the resources required to manage a volunteer taskforce and to undertake community engagement and marketing to spread the word about the service.
Extra Credit: 

  1. Tweaking of the Ushahidi frontend page to enable automated focus of the map on the user location - using a combination of IP geolocalisation,
  2. Persistent Map focusing - profile-based settings, cookies, and local domains may need to be explored
  3. Spatial Filtering of Reports
  4. Enabling Ushahidi alert funcitonality for unverified/unapproved alerts enabling spatially targeted task delivery to moderators
  5. Integration of the Crowd Map Check-in functionality
  6. Moderator support - exploring igoogle widgets, firefox plugins and social plugins for improved moderator collaboration, management and support.

Similar Projects and Resources: 

http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_geolocation.html or its replacement API http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html


OpenLayers Example solution for the automated georeferencing of the user’s location (OpenLayers drives Ushahidi):

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/geolocation.html


http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ for placename conversion

http://code.google.com/apis/igoogle/docs/igoogledevguide.html

http://developers.facebook.com/


http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/12/31/announcing-checkins-for-us...


http://code.google.com/apis/igoogle/docs/igoogledevguide.html

http://developers.facebook.com/

Next Steps and Sustainability: 
Bushfire Connect has been in discussion with government agencies, local communities and private companies in order to raise funding to ensure it can be deployed in a sustainable and on-going way.

With the improvements made over the RHOK weekend we hope to demonstrate localization features that will attract local government support for the service.

Qualitative Impact: 
People will be targeted with relevant information. ,The access to the information will be simpler, and less noisy, saving time needed to react to an alert. Furthermore, the work of moderators will be greatly simplified and therefore likely to be more responsive.
Quantitative Impact: 
All users of the system.

Comments

If you are considering doing this for Rhok December 2011, please feel free to contact me.


Thanks,


Heather Leson
Ushahidi

Heatherleson Nov 30, 2011

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