Over the weekend I attended the “Random Hacks of Kindness” event at Swinburne Uni.
Jim Elliott, from the Bureau of Meteorology, had submitted a problem:

Confirm Flood Warning for Safe Action
Many people receiving warnings of rapidly developing disaster situations such as flash flooding often have the following problems:

  1. They don’t understand that the warning is meant to relate to them
  2. Even if they did, they may not fully perceive the gravity of the threat
  3. When they understand the gravity of the situation, they are not aware of the appropriate protective action to take.

A group of developers found our problem interesting and decided to give it a crack.

The result was two products.

VicAlert
VicAlert is a centralised, standards based alert transport platform for Victoria built upon the international Common Alert Protocol (CAP)
VicAlert aims to unite emergency services distribution of alerts into a common protocol thus enabling a multitude of applications and innovations to be built from the data. These applications and innovations could focus on publishing the alerts cross multiple communication channels (SMS, twitter, web, mobile apps, sirens, etc).

VicSafe
Is and example front end app for consuming and displaying VicAlert data

Check out the presentation the developers put together.
Oh and by the way, VicAlert/VicSafe won first prize!