... And it was launched by Australia's Prime Minister
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 that almost 80% of homeless people in Australia have regular access to a smart phone and data either via a cellular provider or free WiFi (Source: University of Sydney paper: https://accan.org.au/files/Grants/homelessandconnected/Homel...)
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 didn’t 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.
We did a lot of research, working with homeless and at-risk people throughout Australia and Service Providers, it's really been quite an eye opener especially for my team who are largely technically focused. The research encompassed an approach called emotion centred design and was a collaboration between Infoxchange, Navy Design and Swinburne University Centre for Design Innovation.
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 it was called 'the info X change'.
On the technical side, it's essentially a front end (open source) that accesses 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 services like AskIzzy to get the information they need.
In the back end we host the various components of the platforms out of load balanced application containers (Docker) and rely on the usual open source tools of the trade such as Nginx, Puppet, RabbitMQ, GitLab (and Gitlab CI) etc...
Back in 2014 I gave a talk on the history and journey with search and our database of providers - 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 updating data - I think that might be the hardest part, we all know garbage in == garbage out, so we tend not to like the idea of scraping, 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.
The database content of services mostly already existed thanks to us running https://infoxchange.serviceseeker.com.au for the last 20-25 years in its various forms, we spent a lot of time on the research, working with homeless and at risk people to understand what they actually need / want and how they would find it, a lot of UX design went into the project and a lot of time is still being spent on search result quality which is always hard.
I let it find my location and now I can't change it, so I keep getting "Sorry, I couldn't do this search.
Could not find a location matching "Seattle, Washington""
Oh really? That's unexpected - I'll log a bug for this right now. Thank you so much for reporting that, we rely heavily on the input of others just like this.
Hey jacalata, thanks for pointing this out. I've reproduced the issue as best I can, and AFAICT you should see a link on that page which says "Change you answers".
Clicking it should display a list of the answers you've chosen, and the top one should be your location. Clicking that should let you change your location.
If that doesn't work, drop me a line at jcrompton@infoxchange.org -- I'd love to get enough info from you to properly reproduce the bug so we can fix it.
I don't think it's a bug, It took me a while to realize that "Change your answers" is how I change my location too. Perhaps the wording could be changed to make that more clear :)
On the one hand, I'm sorry to hear that the service isn't available outside AU—but also very relieved because I entered very broad parameters and got no locations in New York, New York. I was worried that there were really no resources.
Definitely a good to have service. Definitely feel that updating data is the biggest challenge. We have something similar in my hometown based of Edmonton based on linksf.
The other thing we're currently concentrating on is improving / tuning the quality of the search results, when you have a large, complex data set that feeds to many applications it requires careful consideration and ongoing reevaluation to tune the results and to make sure what people are expecting to find with their queries.
We can release to production via our CI / CD pipeline as often as we need, so if any adjustments are required outside of the data itself it's trivial for us to release new code (images), on one of our other apps we were releasing to production over 40 times a day as features and fixes were developed.
As one of the developers on LinkSF I'd also love to share ideas. We're about to do some serious rewriting after finding out our backend is going away. Really great to see new projects happening in this area of service!
You're right about the data quality, it's a huge job and we have a fantastic team of people who work to keep the data up to date.
Another big challenge is trying to provide useful results in areas (especially remote areas) where we're either missing good data, or where there simply aren't any nearby services. Australia is a huge country and population density tends to be concentrated in a few places, but with a lot of smaller towns and cities scattered about, which can make finding geographically relevant results really difficult.
Definitely a good to have service. Definitely feel that updating data is the biggest challenge. We have something similar in my hometown based of Edmonton based on linksf.
Great idea, but one suggestion would be to make the site as light as humanly possible. Homeless people probably don't have stable or fast connections. Every kilobyte counts.
Small update on this: updated the ticket for it and have started discussion on how best to approach it keeping in mind accessibility design. I think we'll have an update for this in the very near future.
We're really keen on getting any feedback that you might have, good or bad - we're keen to fix any bugs that get found and improve the app as much as possible.
Main dev on the project here (I work for rea-group.com who run www.realestate.com.au, but they've given me a years secondment to the project).
Back in 2013 a team at our hackday implemented the precursor to this app, and the leadership team were super impressed.
It's been amazing working so closely with the sector (we meet/do user testing with representatives from lots of organisations).
This is my first project with react / es7, but I've built a few rich client webapps before. React is definitely the best developer experience I've had with client-side frameworks.
This is an amazing and inspiring initiative and I wish I'd been involved somehow. I'm not sure whereabouts in Australia you're based, but if you're in Sydney I'd love to buy you both a beer :).
One thing I do miss in React is having a baked in data layer. I know know, React is the V in MVC, but still - you see it being compared to Angular, etc all the time.
Ember's ember-data package is so good. I miss it most of all.
As someone who has built many real estate sites, this is done on purpose as a "fuzzy-logic" search as agents feel anyone willing to spend $750k for a home can be easily induced to spend 5-10% more if the right property catches their fancy.
If I have wiggle room, I make my max inclusive of the "x% more if it catches my fancy". It's unintuitive to search for "max $680k" to ensure results are within a $750k budget. As someone who uses real estate sites, this is enough friction to send me elsewhere, where, as tamana says, my preferences and ability are respected. Why not add a slider bar for "perfect place" wiggle room amount/percentage, with a 10% default, but which the user can set to zero?
Exactly, and the next problem is that it seems like EVERY real estate site does this. I have not found a SINGLE site in Australia to look for rent OR buy real estate, that actually filters based on what I enter. They are all useless
Great idea re: the SSID - Melbourne is actually currently rolling out free WiFi for the entire city, also most of the populated areas around town offer free wireless from nearby shops.
My only issues with free wireless hotspots is that they tend to be unencrypted which can be dangerous, however if you're in need of assistance this might be worth the risk.
*Edit: Also we have free wifi if you're near our office building or the near by train station which is an area with a lot of homeless people, from your idea around the SSID name - we'll do that here and spin it up this morning - so thanks for that!
I could still see small hotspots being a useful way of spreading knowledge about the project. You could then also make in window stickers for businesses that offer the service to also promote it.
As a kiwi (Christchurch) that moved to Australia, oh how I miss New Zealand's Internet, the quality and speed of Internet connectivity is a tremendous problem in Australia, I remember when I moved from NZ 4 or so years ago I went from having 150/40Mbit fibre to realising that all I could get in my brand new apartment in Melbourne was 6-12Mbit of unreliable ADSL if I was lucky, i hadn't had ADSL speeds since perhaps back in my high school days. On the flip side it's fantastic to see so many adorable mobile providers compared to NZ, while the speeds may not be great it's more than enough for people in need to find the services they need.
Great idea, but -- why limit it to one site? If bandwidth is the concern, I'd still suggest making available a small suite of sites of special interest to the homeless.
I'm so very proud to have been involved in this in a small way.
I work for realestate.com.au (REA Group), and we've been involved for around 2 years now in one way or another. This has included an REA employee joining the project for a year, and further back a development team of 6 spending a full month working on the front end.
I honestly have to say that some of the stuff coming out of realestate.com.au is pretty amazing. I mean, I was frankly amazed at the quality of your tech blog... I mean, a blog about category theory? I was definitely not expecting that, but it explains why I was actually able to find a house I wanted to buy from the website.
Keep up the good work. Turnbull talks about innovation, but it looks like you guys are actually doing it. I tip my hat to you, and I honestly don't do that lightly!
Just to expand on that a bit, the data is currently limited to our in-house database of services in Australia.
We are looking into including additional (Australian) data sources in the future (for instance, there are some open data sets which various government agencies make available that we'd like to include).
To expand on this, we are a very open organisation that loves knowledge sharing, the front end of the site is open source and we always entertain working with other 3rd parties / organisations to share ideas, so just because we're not planning to launch an off-shore version the app doesn't mean that we won't ever work with others to help create / improve their services or ideas.
In the US there are a couple different groups working on similar projects.
http://www.helpsteps.com is mainly in the Boston area
http://www.auntbertha.com is based out of Austin
Http://www.healthify.us is another one.
There's also an open source project called Ohana that provides an open directory for community resources and services as well as API for people to deploy this sort of idea in their own community. http://ohanapi.org
Tested in Adelaide and after a couple of local results for my fake criteria, it listed shelters interstate, 6-11 days walk away. Maybe don't show those or separate them obviously so they don't confuse anyone.
Or offer an "if all else fails" hotline number at the bottom of the results (even if you have one shown at the top).
Thanks for the input, if it's not too much trouble would you mind submitting where you are and what you searched for perhaps with a screenshot of the map to the 'submit feedback' at the bottom of the page?
Thanks for the feedback, definitely not intentional :)
A lot of effort and consultation with a number of groups (including end users) went into choosing the name. Turns out, naming things is surprisingly hard!
I'm a developer at Infoxchange, and we're actually looking for a senior dev to join our Melbourne team. Development of the Ask Izzy app was a collaboration between our team here and REA group, which goes to show the kind of thing you get to be a part of at Infoxchange.
In Melbourne, we have a small team working on a number of projects with Python, Django, Docker, Elasticsearch and React.js. We run some very modern tech, and we work really closely with our amazing ops team and testers.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, we'd love to talk to you! There's an ad for the position with more detail up on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/112633872 or if you prefer, you can email recruitment@infoxchange.org
I've been Ops lead at Infoxchange for over 3 years now, I never thought I'd stay at an organisation for that long. I truly love my job, it's the first time in my life that I wake up on a Monday morning actually wanting to go to work. The people are fantastic, the organisational ethics are real and transparent and there's little to no bureaucracy.
I guess this is worth a punt: I'm in Sydney and currently out of work. I've got experience with a lot of languages and I learn pretty quickly, in fact I'm currently working on refactoring the Libreoffice codebase.
I'm looking for part time work, and frankly a lower salary doesn't worry me even slightly as I want to focus on looking after my kids and spend more time with my wife... You wouldn't have any part time work going? I'm a dedicated worker who values quality code and practices.
Hopefully this isn't too inappropriate asking on HN!
Chris, completely fine to ask here, What are you Python skills like? If Python isn't your main skillset is there another language you're proficient at?
Even if you don't quite fit into that description certainly email recruitment@infoxchange.org , say that your saw the post here and give some information about yourself!
My Python skills are limited, but that's never stopped me before :-) I've got decent skills in Perl (yeah, ancient but Perl is under appreciated!), Ruby has always been an interest of mine... I guess my main skill is I'm a rapid learner.
I'll have a look at the link - thanks! Will shoot over an email once I'm home.
Regardless of the outcome though, it's impressive what you guys are doing. I love that you are doing something to help the homeless :-)
We're an Australian based organisation and our data and target audience is Australia wide at present, we are doing other work in New Zealand and potentially South Africa - more on this soon.
Idea: Try getting this onboard the internet.org program by Facebook. This is literally the only way I think internet.org could be useful without raising a controversy.
I should have mentioned earlier that if anyone wants to assist us with improving search results quality and has experience with Python and Elasticsearch we'd love to hear from you. The quality of the results is incredibly important but it happens to be one of the biggest challenges when you're dealing with quite large data sets and diverse search usage, please contact us via one of the various links we've provided throughout these comments if you have something to add.
96 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 68.4 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 that almost 80% of homeless people in Australia have regular access to a smart phone and data either via a cellular provider or free WiFi (Source: University of Sydney paper: https://accan.org.au/files/Grants/homelessandconnected/Homel...)
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 didn’t 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.
We did a lot of research, working with homeless and at-risk people throughout Australia and Service Providers, it's really been quite an eye opener especially for my team who are largely technically focused. The research encompassed an approach called emotion centred design and was a collaboration between Infoxchange, Navy Design and Swinburne University Centre for Design Innovation.
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 it was called 'the info X change'.
On the technical side, it's essentially a front end (open source) that accesses 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 services like AskIzzy to get the information they need. In the back end we host the various components of the platforms out of load balanced application containers (Docker) and rely on the usual open source tools of the trade such as Nginx, Puppet, RabbitMQ, GitLab (and Gitlab CI) etc...
Back in 2014 I gave a talk on the history and journey with search and our database of providers - 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 updating data - I think that might be the hardest part, we all know garbage in == garbage out, so we tend not to like the idea of scraping, 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.
The database content of services mostly already existed thanks to us running https://infoxchange.serviceseeker.com.au for the last 20-25 years in its various forms, we spent a lot of time on the research, working with homeless and at risk people to understand what they actually need / want and how they would find it, a lot of UX design went into the project and a lot of time is still being spent on search result quality which is always hard.
For the init...
If you mean AskIzzy - yes we definitely accept pull requests: https://github.com/ask-izzy/ask-izzy
The service is not currently live in the US, we're an Australian based organisation as is our target audience at present.
Clicking it should display a list of the answers you've chosen, and the top one should be your location. Clicking that should let you change your location.
If that doesn't work, drop me a line at jcrompton@infoxchange.org -- I'd love to get enough info from you to properly reproduce the bug so we can fix it.
Thanks!
https://github.com/zendesk/linksf
http://linkyeg.ca/
The other thing we're currently concentrating on is improving / tuning the quality of the search results, when you have a large, complex data set that feeds to many applications it requires careful consideration and ongoing reevaluation to tune the results and to make sure what people are expecting to find with their queries.
We can release to production via our CI / CD pipeline as often as we need, so if any adjustments are required outside of the data itself it's trivial for us to release new code (images), on one of our other apps we were releasing to production over 40 times a day as features and fixes were developed.
You're right about the data quality, it's a huge job and we have a fantastic team of people who work to keep the data up to date.
Another big challenge is trying to provide useful results in areas (especially remote areas) where we're either missing good data, or where there simply aren't any nearby services. Australia is a huge country and population density tends to be concentrated in a few places, but with a lot of smaller towns and cities scattered about, which can make finding geographically relevant results really difficult.
edit: minor edit for clarity
https://github.com/zendesk/linksf
http://linkyeg.ca/
This file is 66KB out of the total 137KB: https://cloud.typography.com/7948374/730248/css/fonts.css - I would remove it and just use a:
Back in 2013 a team at our hackday implemented the precursor to this app, and the leadership team were super impressed.
It's been amazing working so closely with the sector (we meet/do user testing with representatives from lots of organisations).
This is my first project with react / es7, but I've built a few rich client webapps before. React is definitely the best developer experience I've had with client-side frameworks.
Ember's ember-data package is so good. I miss it most of all.
There are plenty of data-layer implementations that work with react, but none are good enough yet (imo) to be the canonical way to do it.
Unrelated, but REAXML has taken years off my life ;)
(eg. if i search for a max limit of $750K, top page of results will all be offer 800k+ sites? - Why let me set a max then ignore it?)
I know what my budget is - I'm not going to search for 10% under that in the hopes that the fuzzy logic brings up exactly what im looking for
https://askizzy.org.au/category/have-your-say/in/2601-Austra...
Suggests that the Commonwealth Ombudsman does not have an office in Canberra. They actually do though[1].
Cool project, good luck with it!
1. http://www.ombudsman.gov.au/pages/contact-us/our-offices/ind...
Remember that people often have phones but are out of data/minutes when they need help the most.
My only issues with free wireless hotspots is that they tend to be unencrypted which can be dangerous, however if you're in need of assistance this might be worth the risk.
If you're interested in what kind of access homeless and at-risk people have to the internet in Australia this is quite a useful paper: https://accan.org.au/files/Grants/homelessandconnected/Homel...
*Edit: Also we have free wifi if you're near our office building or the near by train station which is an area with a lot of homeless people, from your idea around the SSID name - we'll do that here and spin it up this morning - so thanks for that!
I work for realestate.com.au (REA Group), and we've been involved for around 2 years now in one way or another. This has included an REA employee joining the project for a year, and further back a development team of 6 spending a full month working on the front end.
If anyone is interested Malcolm Turnbull's speech from the launch is here: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/2016-01-29/remarks-askizzy-launc...
Edit: Grammar
Keep up the good work. Turnbull talks about innovation, but it looks like you guys are actually doing it. I tip my hat to you, and I honestly don't do that lightly!
We are looking into including additional (Australian) data sources in the future (for instance, there are some open data sets which various government agencies make available that we'd like to include).
There's also an open source project called Ohana that provides an open directory for community resources and services as well as API for people to deploy this sort of idea in their own community. http://ohanapi.org
Or offer an "if all else fails" hotline number at the bottom of the results (even if you have one shown at the top).
Great initiative though.
edit: to downvoters, I'm not trying to be funny here, surely that's potentially useful feedback?
A lot of effort and consultation with a number of groups (including end users) went into choosing the name. Turns out, naming things is surprisingly hard!
-- Phil Karlton
In Melbourne, we have a small team working on a number of projects with Python, Django, Docker, Elasticsearch and React.js. We run some very modern tech, and we work really closely with our amazing ops team and testers.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, we'd love to talk to you! There's an ad for the position with more detail up on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/112633872 or if you prefer, you can email recruitment@infoxchange.org
I'm looking for part time work, and frankly a lower salary doesn't worry me even slightly as I want to focus on looking after my kids and spend more time with my wife... You wouldn't have any part time work going? I'm a dedicated worker who values quality code and practices.
Hopefully this isn't too inappropriate asking on HN!
Check out one of jobs we're hiring for here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/112633872?trk=jobs_home_...
Even if you don't quite fit into that description certainly email recruitment@infoxchange.org , say that your saw the post here and give some information about yourself!
I'll have a look at the link - thanks! Will shoot over an email once I'm home.
Regardless of the outcome though, it's impressive what you guys are doing. I love that you are doing something to help the homeless :-)
One more reason (as if I need more) to be thankful I do at least have a roof over my head.