Australian Bushfires - Donate Housing via bushfirehousing.org
Hi there,
As you may know Victoria has been hit with horrific bushfires in the last week. Since the mercury went soaring on Saturday to 46 degrees and beyond, fires have been raging out of control in bush in Victoria. A drought 10 years in length combined with a string of record temperature days has resulted (with the help of arsonists - damn every last one of them to hell) in massive destruction. Whole towns have been razed and the death toll is nearing 200 with no signs of slowing down. Worse still the fires are still burning in some areas and may join up again to try to repeat the devastation visited upon Kinglake, Strathewen, Flowerdale, Marysville etc.
While there are hundreds dead, there are scores of people homeless and in need of shelter. The lovely Jonathan Poh [http://www.jonathanpoh.com/] (@jpoh [http://twitter.com/jpoh/] ) came to work yesterday and suggested that we build a site much like the one used for Hurricane Katrina to help link people willing to donate accommodation to those evacuated residents requiring shelter. A group of us including Gil
[http://flamingmongrel.net/] (@gilfer [http://twitter.com/gilfer/]), Dimitry, Becky, Ben [http://www.benbalbo.com], Andrew and myself resolved that we would build the site and launch it as soon as possible to assist in the relief effort.
And so within 16 working hours we have a working site capable to connection people in need with people who can help them. I thought my job was good for nothing. It is nice to know that I work with people who are capable of pulling something of this magnitude off. They are superstars, each and every one!
Our site - www.bushfirehousing.org has now been released - in its first iteration.
Please be upstanding for Bushfire Housing [http://bushfirehousing.org/], an online tool to facilitate the pairing of those that are homeless due to the Australian bushfires with those
that have room in their house, a vacant rental, newly purchased investment property or holiday home they wish to offer as temporary accomodation.
We Need Your Help
This site isn’t going to work if no-one knows about it, so please tell everyone you know. If you can help, please sign up and list yourself. Go viral - post this on Twitter and Identi.ca, write a blog
post, set your LinkedIn and Facebook statuses. Call your local talk back radio show. Email your friends and colleagues. Add a Bushfire Housing badge to your blog and company web sites.
Have you got an idea of how to spread the word? Let me know in the comments of my blog - www.dandabelle.com.
What’s In Store For The Site?
We wrote the whole site in about 8 hours and have spent the last 6 hours working on minor bug fixes and UI updates. Given the nature of the site, we’re working extreme agile; ideally having multiple
release cycles per day.
Stuff for phase two includes SMS notification, Google map integration and more. If you have any suggestions or feedback, leave a comment.
Thanks in advance for your support,
Danielle
Thanks to Ben Balbo for drafting a large component of this post!
No Need to Catastrophise!
Except when there is…Forecast for Saturday is a scorching 43 degrees! So my party is moving to Sunday 8th of Feb which the forecast says will be a much more manageable 25 degrees.
Are 40+ degree days a sign of the end of the world. A god I don’t believe in seems to want to fry me up and make me a crispy critter!
Even more disturbing is that this is probably climate change/global warming related…what has previously only been concerning is quickly ratcheting up to scary.
Oh well…change of date. I hope that I will still see you there 
