A Shelter Concierge Bot

[aflores]

Spending time at a shelter during a disaster can be a strenuous experience, from selecting the most appropriate place to finding information about those things that one might need.

The Shelter Concierge Bot will guide you by finding the answer to questions like:

How to select the appropriate shelter given your personal situation (Medical needs? Pets? Distance) Once at a given shelter, what services are available to me? Where is the nearest: Pharmacy, ATM, Laundromat, etc…

Ideally, the Shelter Concierge Bot will be available via: web, SMS (text) and voice if possible, and available a few days before the storm and for a couple of weeks after.

[greggish]

Good news, we already built this!

The real problem in this issue is the supply side of the data: there are many sources of information about shelter availability, and none of them are totally reliable. So we're building a tool to help people compare multiple sources of shelter data, and verify correct information.

We might want to update this issue, and/or close it and open a new one. (Although of course there might be more work that could be done on the shelter bot...)

[bkerley]

free form notes from discussion with @greggish and @aflores follow:

Need for information at/near the shelter about public/commercial services i.e. laundromat/washer/dryer, atm, pharmacy, coffee Shelter concierge

Greg knows of: tool to compare government, Red Cross shelter data, identify and resolve conflicts, verify accuracy “Irma shelters website” aggregated data, not just Florida, AL, SC, GA

Will that system have an open api Disasters decentralize things

“A viable national shelter system (NSS) would be one that queries a bunch of different APIs and gives me a canonical record of which shelters are available.” Official sources conflict,

https://github.com/Irma-Response/irma-response-bot-api

Multi-source reconciliation tool

Difference between evacuation centers and shelters

[greggish]

@aflores see here for a Knowledge Base of disaster response technology.

[greggish]

Meanwhile, @yamilethmedina has created a repo for the Shelter Data Steward project here.

Here is a kinda crappy demo doc of the project. @bkerley

[aflores]

I forked the repo and was able to make some progress. I got the app to launch and I can see the service calls to the gateway in the browser console. On the java (gateway side) I got a clean compile but I have a runtime error. I hope to have time this evening to debug the java problem.

May changes were needed: Upgrade of angular-material and some code conversion. On the java side, the pom was missing some references (javax.mail and dependencies)

Is this consistent with what you guys saw?

[greggish]

Which project are you referring to – the concierge bot or the 'Shelter Data Steward' project?

[aflores]

right, the Code-for-Miami/shelter-project https://github.com/Code-for-Miami/shelter-project which I forked on my repo as https://github.com/aflores/shelter-project but I am not ready to do a PR

[greggish]

ok great! we weren;'t able to get that up and running, so it;s awesome that you were able to!

Documentation of all this would be very welcome.