Vancouver, 27 August 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

It is often surprising to many how quickly ideas re-using PSI can be turned into working prototypes. The Vancouver Shelter app is an example of how to get from an idea to an app in 4 hours. Mike Ivanov, a Vancouver coder and blogger, describes his work during the recent OpenBC (BC for British Columbia) hackathon:

"Tara Gibbs pitched this wonderful idea of consolidating shelter availability data and displaying it on a few window displays, so the homeless people living DTES would not waste their time going from one shelter to another just to find a free spot.

This doesn't solve all the problems of course, but it does solve a little yet very annoying one.

So... At 11:30 we had nothing but an idea. We discussed possible approaches for a while, then came David Eaves and suggested using Twitter as a message queue service.

At approximately 12:00 we still had nothing but a piece of paper covered with boxes and arrows, then we started coding. Tara did the frontend, I was busy hacking the backend and the Twitter stuff.

Four hours later we had a fully functional, production ready system -https://github.com/mikeivanov/vanshelter"

The app works as follows:

• Shelter facilities send out their availability updates out on Twitter.
• The VanShelter application takes this information and displays it as an dashboard, refreshing upon receiving new information.
• The dashboard are set up as screens around the city where homeless people are likely to encounter them.

Below is a screenshot of the app: