Relief1 - Disaster Preparedness, Relief, Recovery

Our mission is to be the place people go to before and after a disaster strikes. Whether you're a survivor, volunteer, multi-national non-profit or government agency, we want to provide you with the tools and services needed to quickly bring a state of normalcy back to those whose lives have been disrupted.

Why?

Nobody knows when a natural disaster will strike, and when they do, people turn to social media and ad hoc websites to disseminate information and seek help. Often times this leads to an inefficient system of placing needs with those who can help. Having watched my hometown of Joplin, Missouri being destroyed by one of the deadliest tornados in recorded history, I decided it is time to solve this problem for the last time.

We believe there is a better way

There are no permanent websites with the purpose of preparing for, responding to and rebuilding after a disaster. We want to build a central hub designed from the ground up with a set of comprehensive tools and services powered by volunteers and fellow non-profits to solve this problem.

We’re going to help Survivors and those Impacted by disasters by:

• Making it easy to submit Missing Person Reports, which we instantly share with search and rescue, local and national media as well as social media

• Providing them with an efficient way to submit their needs be they material (Gluten-free food) or service based (medical care)

• Allowing them to easily see material and service based resources on our interactive map

• Making it possible to access our service via SMS

We’re going to help Volunteers by:

• Providing them with an automatic notification system based on their skills and location

• Helping them easily search and find where needs are located

We’re going to help Organizations by:

• Making it possible to see where volunteers and staff are located on the map

• Allowing organizers to set waypoints for the deployment of their staff and volunteers

• Giving them a way to create projects and assign tasks to volunteers, leading to measurable performance

• Helping organizations manage their material resources, deployment and logistics

We Need Your Help

A project of this scope and vision requires help from many people. There is room for everyone who wants to help.

• Want to help? Check out our open tickets here: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/relief1/tickets/agile_planner?id=relief1

• Join us at #relief1 on the Freenode IRC service if you have any ideas, questions, or need direction concerning helping out.

Programmers:

0. Fork.
1. Create a branch with some meaningful name.
2. Hack (tests for new features will be appreciated)!
3. Verify that the tests are still passing (nodeunit test).
4. Commit.
5. Push.
6. Pull request.

Internals

Here’s our list of technologies we are using to build this service.

Back-end development libraries and tools

• Node.js - http://nodejs.org/

• Socket.io - https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io

• dnode - https://github.com/substack/dnode

• Hook.io - https://github.com/hookio/hook.io

• Cradle - https://github.com/cloudhead/cradle

Front-end development

• HTML

• CSS

• jQuery - https://github.com/jquery/jquery

• Knockout.js - https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout

Databases

• Couchbase - http://www.couchbase.org/

• GeoCouch - https://github.com/couchbase/geocouch

• Riak - http://wiki.basho.com/

TODO

• revitalize the project