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.
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...
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
We put the idea to Google as part of their 'impact challenge' which they give funding for good ideas that help develop technical services / projects for society and those in need.
The database of services mostly already existed thanks to us running that for the last 20-25 years in various forms as mentioned in my other reply.
We spent a lot of time on the research and working with homeless and at risk people to understand what they actually need / want and how they would find it, a lot of UX research went into the project and a lot of time is still being spent on search result quality which if you've dealt with before - is always hard.
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] threadI 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.
> 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.
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...
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
We put the idea to Google as part of their 'impact challenge' which they give funding for good ideas that help develop technical services / projects for society and those in need.
The database of services mostly already existed thanks to us running that for the last 20-25 years in various forms as mentioned in my other reply.
We spent a lot of time on the research and working with homeless and at risk people to understand what they actually need / want and how they would find it, a lot of UX research went into the project and a lot of time is still being spent on search result quality which if you've dealt with before - is always hard.