Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

askizzy.org.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#21

Post by mrmondo »

telecuda wrote: post #18

Idea: Put free WiFi hotspots in homeless areas (SSID: AskIzzy) that go directly to (and are limited to) your site when the browser launches. Remember that people often have phones but are out of data/minutes when they need help the most.

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.

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!

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#22

Post by vertis »

mrmondo wrote: post #21
telecuda wrote: post #18

Idea: Put free WiFi hotspots in homeless areas (SSID: AskIzzy) that go directly to (and are limited to) your site when the browser launches. Remember that people often have phones but are out of data/minutes when they need help the most.

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. If you're interested in what kind of access homeless and at-ri…

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.

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#24

Post by danielheath »

sergiotapia wrote: post #19
danielheath wrote: post #16

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…

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.

I don't think baked-in is a great idea unless the data layer is really good.

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.

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#25

Post by jscn »

mpnordland wrote: post #23

Are there any plans to expand the apps reach beyond Australia, or is there any alternative for the US?

No plans to expand outside of Australia that I'm aware of. Another commenter mentioned (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11029770) a similar product for the SF area: http://linkyeg.ca/

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#26

Post by jscn »

jscn wrote: post #25
mpnordland wrote: post #23

Are there any plans to expand the apps reach beyond Australia, or is there any alternative for the US?

No plans to expand outside of Australia that I'm aware of. Another commenter mentioned ( https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11029770 ) a similar product for the SF area: http://linkyeg.ca/

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).

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#27

Post by mrmondo »

jscn wrote: post #25
mpnordland wrote: post #23

Are there any plans to expand the apps reach beyond Australia, or is there any alternative for the US?

No plans to expand outside of Australia that I'm aware of. Another commenter mentioned ( https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11029770 ) a similar product for the SF area: http://linkyeg.ca/

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.

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#28

Post by JoshTriplett »

mrmondo wrote: post #12
sergiotapia wrote: post #11

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. 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: font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;

Absolutely, could not agree more - we already have an open ticket for this actually! Thanks for the feedback.

Related presentation with additional information on data-limited mobile users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jmqsq2OQjc&index=3&list=PLN...

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#29

Post by prawn »

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).

Great initiative though.

Re: Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

#30

Post by jscn »

osipovas wrote: post #5

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. https://github.com/zendesk/linksf http://linkyeg.ca/

Great stuff!

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

Post reply on HN