Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

https://askizzy.org.au

by mrmondo • 10 years ago

151 93 10 years ago

askizzy.org.au

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

... 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.

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

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

Note: We're also looking for a Python developer to join our team in Melbourne, see Josh's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030860

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

I just tried to view the site, but getting a blank page :-( but do you accept pull requests?

jacalata3• 10 years ago

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""

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

Hi Jacalata,

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

jacalata3• 10 years ago

No, I get that. What i was pointing out was that once it had a location, I couldn't change it (it never asked me again).

daturkel• 10 years ago

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.

osipovas• 10 years ago

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/

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

Thank you for the links - we'll check them out!

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.

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

Do you have a git repository?

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

Just checked out the project - great work! I'll pass this on to our project leaders and our developers. Perhaps we could even share some ideas?

roseleaf• 10 years ago

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!

jscn9• 10 years ago

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

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

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;

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

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

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

e40• 10 years ago

Every city in the world needs something like this.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

danielheath3• 10 years ago

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.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

It's been fantastic having Daniel on board for this and really great of REA to help with resourcing the project.

barbs• 10 years ago

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 :).

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

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.

danielheath3• 10 years ago

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.

girvo• 10 years ago

Well done on the project from another Aussie dev! Agreed on React/ES7 -- absolutely amazing for rich-app development.

Unrelated, but REAXML has taken years off my life ;)

ishi• 10 years ago

Anything with XML in it would do that to you...

bobbles3• 10 years ago

Offtopic, but I don't suppose you could provide any insight into why real estate websites ask for search filters and then completely ignore them?

(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?)

cubano2• 10 years ago

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.

gaelian• 10 years ago

A bit of data feedback for you, getting to this page on your app:

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...

jscn9• 10 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, gealian! I've let our data team know about the problem.

telecuda2• 10 years ago

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.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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!

vertis2• 10 years ago

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.

tomlock• 10 years ago

Telstra has free wi-fi for prepaid customers until June, its called Telstra Air. Source: I work for Telstra.

toomanybeersies2• 10 years ago

The city I'm in just has free wifi throughout the CBD.

yitchelle• 10 years ago

Which city?

borkabrak2• 10 years ago

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.

telecuda2• 10 years ago

Even better

shitlord• 10 years ago

What if they want to check their email to see if they got a job or a place to stay?

vertis2• 10 years ago

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.

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

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

It's been great having you (and the team at REA) involved, thank you so much!

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

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!

mpnordland• 10 years ago

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

jscn9• 10 years ago

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/

jscn9• 10 years ago

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).

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

pwarrington• 10 years ago

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

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

Thank you for posting those links!

prawn2• 10 years ago

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.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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?

prawn2• 10 years ago

I'm in Halifax Street (Adelaide 5000). It showed a hotline, two local options and then the rest were over a week's walk away.

ptype• 10 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I first read the name as "ass-kissing" - intentional?

edit: to downvoters, I'm not trying to be funny here, surely that's potentially useful feedback?

jscn9• 10 years ago

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!

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

-- Phil Karlton

thieving_magpie• 10 years ago

I had the same thought when I read it. As unfortunate as it is to bring up, it still seems valid to me.

haiwenchen• 10 years ago

Seriously....

jscn9• 10 years ago

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

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

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!

borkabrak2• 10 years ago

I love this idea. Unfortunately, everything I tried gave me:

    Sorry, I couldn't do this search.

    Could not find a location matching "Nashville, Tennessee"

I'm.. so proud. :-/

One more reason (as if I need more) to be thankful I do at least have a roof over my head.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

arsalanb• 10 years ago

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.

mrmondo28• 10 years ago

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.

adamrights2• 10 years ago

Nice job guys

adamrights2• 10 years ago

Nice job guys!

rawTruthHurts• 10 years ago

Errr... I have to ask... so... a homeless chap... with a mobile device???

Show HN: AskIzzy – a mobile website for homeless people

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