
Today we launched a website for homeless people - mrmondo
https://askizzy.org.au
======
mrmondo
... And it was launched by Australia's Prime Minister -
[http://goo.gl/tRnGSD](http://goo.gl/tRnGSD)

I work @infoxchange as the operations lead, when I first heard the idea of a
website or app for people that have found or are worried about finding
themselves homeless in Australia I really didn't think it made sense - until I
saw the stats showing how many homeless people in Australia have regular
access to a smart phone and data either via a cellular provider or free WiFi.

Today we served up over 54,000 requests to the site and it's only in it's
first stage of inception.

We did a lot of research, working with homeless and at-risk people throughout
Australia, it's really been quite an eye opener especially for my team who are
largely technically focused.

AskIzzy is the result of Infoxchange winning the Google Impact Challenge in
2015. For me the most interesting things about the site other than it's value
to those in need is that it didnt cost tax payers a cent to develop or host
and it has no model for making profit of any kind, this resulted in the site
being designed truly for the end consumer - the person in need.

~~~
sramam
The insight on mobile device access among the homeless was very non-obvious
and interesting.

> it didnt cost tax payers a cent to develop or host Wasn't clear from the
> site on how it was funded. Could you share?

That seems like an really large number of data sources to put into one
interface.

Could you share some insight on how the data came together? How is the data
accessed - api, datadump? How is it kept current?

Nicely done! Thanks for sharing.

~~~
mrmondo
Good question - we (Infoxchange) have had a large database of providers
centred around services for disadvantaged and at risk people in Australia
since the early 90s, it goes back so far that we used to offer this
information up over BBS - and we actually ran the very first 'online' search
engine in Australasia, back then I think it was actually called 'the info X
change' or something quite corny like that but hey - it was the 90s!

I gave a talk on the history and journey with search and our database of
providers back in 2014 - those slides are still very much relevant and contain
some screenshots from the mid 90s of someone accessing the data via mosaic -
check out: [https://smcleod.net/search-a-journey-of-delivery-on-a-
budget...](https://smcleod.net/search-a-journey-of-delivery-on-a-budget/)

With regards to AskIzzy, it's essentially a front end that accessed data from
our services & providers database which is called 'Infoxchange service
seeker', that platform is a number of Python app that use Elasticsearch backed
by PostgreSQL with PostGIS, it has its own set of front ends for various
purposes and has a pretty flexible API to query data, which is what is used by
things like AskIzzy to get the information they need.

With regards to updating data - that is obviously the hardest part, we all
know garbage in = garbage out, so we tend not to like the idea of scraping or
anything like that. Many service providers do not have the technical skills or
infrastructure to expose the the state of their services online but are more
than happy to fill out a small status update form on a website, email an
update to one of our systems etc... We also have a dedicated team of database
updaters that make regular stop ins with service providers to ensure their
details are correct.

I should also mention that we are 100% non-profit, charitable organisation -
so we're not making any money off AskIzzy or any other platform / service we
run and were very transparent about that.

* sorry for any typos - wrote this reply on my phone

------
Snowalker
so homeless people don't have homes but they will have internet access? Dumb.

~~~
mrmondo
It's a crazy world we live in right? Many people are donated phones and you
can buy them for $30 or so at the local supermarkets. It's not so easy to find
accommodation and food.

