Posted by david jeyachandran on January 17, 2011 at 2:48pm
We need two volunteers for a Drupal 6 website - Theming and improving the process for users and integration with Facebook.
I made the mistake of creating a website without first checking with the Drupal community. QldFloods.org has done such an amazing job and we are working to ensure that we do not overlap. Disasterhelp.me is a simple site based on finding local resources on a Google Map. We want to keep the website simple and work on a clean look.
Here is an opportunity to work in a small team and make your mark on this website. It has been live since Sunday 16th Jan.
http://disasterhelp.me
This website will help provide home-made meals to many flood affected people.
Comments
floodaid.com.au
There's another Drupal-based website going as well - http://floodaid.com.au - we're a large group of volunteers, including people from the Drupal community, doing a similar thing as you and live since Friday afternoon.
We're also sending our beds traffic to QLD floods, however the rest of your functionality we seem to be covering (aside from the maps, which are just waiting for enough properly geolocated submissions to be worth it).
We would love to get some extra Drupal help if you guys (or anyyone else) would like to help us – however if not we're also almost finished with an API for others to use our data.
Feel free email me at mario@floodaid.com.au if you'd like to chat further!
Leveraging people's donated time on QLD floods
Guys
Make it all one big interlinked project - Project Noah.
Then write a media release for the combined efforts of the Australian Drupal developers community and get some recognition for Drupal and the people who are donating their time, using the blog, the resulting web site, abit of Facebook and a dash of Twitter.
Regards
John Young
Yindi Systems
www.yindi.net
m: 0407 940 943
On 18 January 2011 08:33, mariooo NO-REPLY@groups.drupal.org wrote:
John Young
Yindi Systems
web: www.yindi.net
twitter: @yindisystems
post implementation review
After the big rush and workload has subsided we will be doing some case studies / post implementation reviews.
We will focus on the strengths of the networked community, the difficulties in managing that, the benefits of the remote models and the many ways ion which we could have worked better together.
similar to premier blighs commission - we woll make this an open opportunity and provide the case study as a result to the community.
At this point it may be
At this point it may be worthwhile diversifying this to include Victoria and other flood affected areas.
This is the intention of
This is the intention of http://floodaid.com.au.
While at the moment the largest response is from the Queensland population, there are no locale-specific things going on.
Some people have even been looking into deploying an instance for the Brazilian floods.
QLD Floods is including Vic
We started coverage of the victorian floods, late sunday. We're discussing possible ways to adjust the navigation to reflect the broader coverage, but you'll probably see a few front page posts about it today.
We've also got the code in half way decent shape that someone else could spin up a cloned instance fairly quickly if anyone has the man power. I've got a few domains as well like vicfloods.org and brazilfloods.org which i'm happy to donate to any group that wants to use them.
Not to discourage people, but please note that its not just a tech team that is needed. We've got a team of over 40 volunteers working on this (and we still need lots of help!), and that's not including all the different people manning the call centre that we got setup. Our tech team is a pretty small component of that.
I also understand the need for people who want to work on their own, or provide a niche they think is valuable, but keep in mind that getting attention from the people that need this is hard. We are trying to be consistent about where we send people and is tending to converge on 3 areas - goods (oxfam), manpower/services (volunteeringqld), and space (qldfloods.org). There are a short list of information sites as well like the abc and govt sites and we seem to have become one of the short listed sites as an aggregation hub.
I've been in touch with both disasterhelp.me and floodaid.com.au, and we're directing traffic as appropriate I think. Disasterhelp.me is focusing on people volunteering meals and floodaid.com.au is taking general offers of help until they find a niche as well. We would like to combine forces more, and my I'd like to encourage anyone else who is interested to contact me about getting involved. There's lots to do and plenty of things to leave your mark on.
Let's also stay focused on the help people are trying to provide - which is just awesome.
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
limited ability
We would love to also - but we are entirely running on volunteer hours and infrastructure - and we are running dry - we are in a holding pattern maintaining the site with no ability to expand at the moment without some form of corporate / government involvement (money)
anybody got some cashed up companies willing to contribute we do have some presentations we can make :)
Could you give a bit more info
Hi Tim, Could you please tells us a bit more about what you'd like to do. Would you like to expand outside the website area? (btw Great idea about having a call centre especially since lots of flood affected people won't have smart phones or Internet access).
Ticket Backlog
we've got a ticket system with various things that can be addressed. A few things we've got in the works:
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
Mapping and Geocoding
Hi Ryan,
Is this something that I could help with? What I've done is fairly simple but I could see how having each bed offer on a map could be really powerful.
I'm having an annoying problem where if people don't put in an exact address, the Geocoding is not working and I need to do a bit of reading and investigation.
David
Maybe try a maps prompt
We're having the same problem with floodaid – tried to minimise by inserting a google map with JS on the help creation form that geocodes and places a marker for what they are typing into the fields on-the-fly, and gives them a warning if the google maps API doesn't seem to understand the address.
Feel free to pull the (somewhat messy) code out of our custom.js!
Thanks for that! :)
Thanks for that! Will check out your code. Sounds like you've done some good work to make that process simple for users.
Privacy
Please be really careful about doing this with that kind of data. These are people's private homes. They want to help, but its also very risky to publicly advertise your personal space.
There have been reports of sexual assault at emergency shelters, not to mention the looters, homeless, crazies. You can see our warnings and privacy policies for some guidance if it helps.
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
Yeah – you make a good point
Yeah – you make a good point Ryan.
However there are many applications of geolocative data that don't compromise people's privacy. Ie automatic match-ups/suggestions for requests/offers that are geographically close, or search listing ordering based on proximity.
We can also choose to use postcode based geolocation to display information on maps to the public, while reserving pin-point location for anonymous map displays of how requests and offers are distributed.
The biggest loss is not collecting or collecting bad data in the first place!
yes..but
This is true, but it depends on your application as well. For this need, I think its actually better not to have the full address. It requires someone to make contact directly with the person, and then we implement our proprietary technology code-named "Human Intelligence" to filter out any bad people.
There are enough risks with managing someone's email/phone number in my opinion. You have no idea how quickly spammers and data scrapers started popping up and taking the data. We have barely had time to be in google's search indexes at this point.
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
well...
Address and phone number shouldn't be displayed publicly IMO. If you're doing that then there's definitely privacy concerns to be worried about.
We opted to have a contact system that sends your own details to someone who's made a posting, not the other way around, so each individual can choose who they want their phone/email details to go to based on the help they offer or request, and use their own "Human Intelligence" to filter out any bad people – rather than putting that responsibility on a certain group of people – who could make mistakes.
So I would think the full address, in this context, plays no part in diminishing the level of privacy a user has – it simply allows the system to have the potential to provide increasingly more helpful data in increasingly more effective ways to users.
Privacy and Geocoding Addresses
Sorry for the late response on this one... Yes, agree about addresses not being publically displayed. With DisasterHelp website we removed the display of the Street Address (though we recorded that info). Later stripped all the street number info because it was still too easy to zoom in on the map and see exactly a person lived. Also in the end removed everyone's last name as this was not required. Most people had entered their full name in the Name field.
Like your idea of a contact form. Did you have any spam getting through the Captcha text?
spam
some go through before enabling mollom
after that very limited - mollom catches almost everything
Thanks for that!
Looks very impressive. Also using Janrain that I saw that you were using for authentication.
JanRain
RPX Janrain is a very good module for the 3rd party identifiers
really increases membership as its much easier for people to create accounts - we like it!
Yep
Yep, there are ways to handle this though. Mapping modules in D7 are quite behind the mark at the moment, so I have some alternative approaches in mind. You should have my email if you're interested. Would welcome the help (or anyone else's).
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
ryan said it
some content moderation and content creation assistance wouldn't hurt - anybody with a bit of journalism inside can create an account and blog away.
contact admins if you want to help with comment and forum moderation
cheers
PR for Floods Project
Guys
I have 25+ years of marketing in a variety of industries including IT, Internet and telco. I am relatively new to the world of Drupal, as I am project managing the creation of a new online business in the Drupal+PHP+MySQL platform.
I admire what you are doing. I come from a dairy farming community on the far north coast that has had to live with the reality of the Clarence River flooding the coastal plain every 5 years or so.
The only way I could contribute would be to write some media releases and put them out to the many publications in the IT/telco/Internet sectors, with the objective of
a) gaining wider support from other individuals or organisations, including sponsorship in kind
b) gaining some visibility for Drupal in the Australian business, not-for-profit and govt sectors
Drop me an email if someone wants to discuss my potential contribution to helping flood victims.
John Young
john.young@yindi.net
www.yindi.net
John Young
Yindi Systems
web: www.yindi.net
twitter: @yindisystems
Media Release on Drupal flood aid sites
Guys
I have drafted a quick Media Release about the work being done by Drupal developers to aid the flood victims.
Can I ask
1) Where are the main groups/teams/individuals geographically located who are creating these various web sites using Drupal?
2) Is there a nominated spokes person who can act as a contact point for media organisations who may want more info about the various projects, and to organise photos or some video footage.
3) Has anyone assembled a list of media outlets yet that any Media Releases can be sent to?
4) Has anyone come up with a collective name for all these soggy Drupal developers and designers who are wooking on the various floods projects? It needs a BRANDNAME, so the media can generate a 30 sec grab about the project.
John Young
0407 940 943
John Young
Yindi Systems
web: www.yindi.net
twitter: @yindisystems
emailed you on this
John I have emailed you on this
answering questions for public view here
1) all over australia
2) and 3) I am the project coordinator for the http://qldfloods.org website - we have a PR manager who has compiled all the press releases and forwarded them to many agencies and media outlets already - tv shows already done with channel 7, abc and cnn as well as abc online and mentions on channel 9 news and today show
4) not sure its needed
Cheers