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.

Australian Floods - Overview of online (mapping) resources

[Last updated 14 Jan 2011, 3:40 PM AEDST]

Source: smh.com.au 

There is an abundance of information and mapping resources springing up online to deal with the

ongoing Australian floods.

I have compiled an overview of online resources that can assist the affected communities in dealing with this disaster while it happens, and in the aftermath.

NOTE - RESOURCE LISTINGS HAVE BEEN MOVED TO REGION SPECIFIC PAGES:

• National Resources
• QLD Resources
• NSW Resources
• VIC Resources 

As resources will come and go, this will be a bit of a moving feast, but with your help, I will try & keep it as current and accurate as possible.

If you have any suggestions or links to be added, please comment below, or send me a tweet (@mvandervlugt) or email (mauritsrutger -at- gmail.com).

And please share these pages with others!

"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.

National Emergency Warning System still has some way to go

Partly in response to the Victoria Bushfires in February 2009, the Federal Government late last year launched the "National Emergency Warning System" (NEWS): http://www.alp.org.au/media/1209/msag040.php . It was immediately also trialled in NSW under the name 'Emergency Alert'.

The system works by sending voice and text (SMS) messages to phones in the threatened area.

Telstra and the government are quick to point out the obvious flaw in this system, that they say will be addressed in future versions: Messages go out according to phones with their billing address in the area under threat only, which is not guaranteed to be the phones' actual location, especially in case of mobiles. Furthermore, people may be interested in areas beyond their phone's location.