The Rise and Fall of Bushfire Connect

This week, Bushfire Connect closed up shop, after more than two years collecting and sharing Australian bushfire information and alerts with local communities.


The official statement is here. In this post, I’m sharing some personal views and experiences.

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

Today I presented Bushfire Connect to the 'Innovative Emergency Management' conference in Sydney. During this two-day conference, several speakers brought up issues around community resilience, the changing behavioural and technological context for Emergency Managers and the need for communities to self-organise in the face of more frequent and more extreme natural disasters.

All this was a perfect lead-in for Bushfire Connect. As the slides show (see below), I was able to segue in with a quote from an earlier speaker Craig Lapsley, Victorian Fire Services Commissioner, who said that "there is a need for change", and "...empower communities with Timely, Relevant and Tailored information".

Bushfire Connect does exactly that: collecting and sharing timely and relevant information, and delivering tailored alerts to the community.

It was very encouraging to find fertile ground among the audience consisting largely of hard-core Emergency Managers. Positive experiences, questions and suggestions from the room. Would we have seen the same response 12 months ago?

Who knows. One thing is for sure, with every disaster, from Queensland to Christchurch and Japan, the role of Social media is increasing and becoming more and more sophisticated.

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt.

Bushfire Connect goes ‘live’

http://bushfireconnect.org 

After more than 6 months of preparations, today saw the first ‘live’ action of http://bushfireconnect.org, a not-for-profit website to report and share (hyper-) local news and updates on bushfires in Australia.

Driven fully by volunteers, Bushfire Connect (BFC) integrates citizen reporting with official agency information, and allows anyone to subscribe to receive customised alerts via email or SMS.

It was great to see that despite BFC being spawned in Victoria, West Australians picked up on its potential and started reporting on the devastating fires raging around Perth at the moment. Traffic to the site is peaking attracting hundreds of unique visitors on its first day in action. The servers are coping admirably so far.

I must say I feel really pumped to get to this point, having worked with a really great bunch of volunteers who all donated lots of their spare time for this cause. The team page on our blog is unfortunately not up to date, so I hereby extend my deep gratitude to all of you:

•           Daniela Fernandez (Sydney)
•           Keren Flavell (Melbourne)
•           Serene Ho (Melbourne)
•           Anthony Joseph (Sydney)
•           Darren Mottolini (joining us today from Perth to moderate WA reports)
•           Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein (Sydney)
•           Martin Tomko (Zurich & Melbourne)

And lastly to Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier for bringing the original team together back in May 2010, and being there for lots of advice.

"Random Hacks of Kindness" comes to Sydney

Last weekend, 40 committed volunteers came together at the University of New South Wales' Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to participate in what's geekily known as a 'Hack-a-thon'.

After a successful first event last year in the USA, Random Hacks of Kindness this year went global, organising hacking events with multiple global locations bringing together developers from all over the world to hack on real-world problems. Over the weekend, groups were working away in Washington DC, Jakarta, Nairobi, Sao Paolo, Porta Alegre, Santiago de Chile, and of course, Sydney.