Building Community Resilience
As an example, the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, burnt the equivalent of 1 million football fields, displaced 7,500 people across 78 townships, resulting in 173 dead and 2000 houses lost.
We know when bushfires happen, people want fast access to trustworthy information. Bushfire Connect aggregates information from multiple sources: official and social, about events and incidents such as community meetings, fires, and road closures, in a way that empowers anyone to contribute local knowledge and make informed decisions.
Bushfire Connect delivers this information through multiple media such as the web, mobile devices and custom SMS.
Bushfire Connect is an online bushfire crisis service presenting real time 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 Bushfire Connect website maps fire related incidents added by people via SMS, smart phone applications or through the website. People in remote areas needing information quickly can receive customized, automatic SMS alerts direct to their phones.
Bushfire Connect overcomes the limitations with the current, official fire alert services by improving timeliness and relevance of data by empowering tens of thousands of people to contribute a human intelligence stream of content including text, images and video.
The system is a central repository collecting crowd-sourced incident data and layering it with information from official sources.
Bushfire Connect will be developed using Ushahidi ([2]), an open-source platform developed in Kenya and most recently used in Haiti and for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
This is a real project, that will be rolled out in the state of Victoria (Australia) by December 2010. We have created a first, non-prescriptive 'Mockup' as a thought starter: [3].
Possible features: - Ability to submit using these categories via twitter/email/webform - Ability to create RSS feed - Ability to display reports - Ability to feed in any official content streams
More information: see Maurits van der Vlugt ([4]) or Keren Flavell ([5])