Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

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.

For the initial funding, 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. A number of other organisations around Australia have assisted us by providing media coverage, additional development and testing resources which we are very grateful for. Ongoing we will be checking to see if it has made the difference we think it can by a research project measuring social impact over several years.

We are a not-for-profit, charitable organisation - we're not making any money off AskIzzy and pride ourselves on our financial and technical transparency.

* Product video: https://www.infoxchange.net.au/ask-izzy

* Launch video: http://goo.gl/tRnGSD

* Code base: https://github.com/ask-izzy/ask-izzy

Within the first few days of the launch we had:

- 7290 total unique visitors

- 172,266 requests have been served

- 8,119 sessions

- 6,759 unique users

- 123,885 page views

- 00:02:59 average session duration

- 82.4% new visitors / 17.6% returning visitors

- 0.7% bounce rate

*Edit: I should note that if you're not in Australia and want to try out an Australian location search - try 3000 which is Melbourne's CBD

The service is not currently live in the US, we're an Australian based organisation as is our target audience at present.

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