Portland Housing Emergency Outreach and Community Safety Web-app:
The goal of this project is to provide resources for Portland residents that are experiencing or are vulnerable to experiencing issues relating to homelessness .
This project also has the goal to educate Portland residents about the extent of the housing crisis impacting the Portland and Portland metro area, as well as inform them on ways that they can take action to make an impact in their communities and make Portland a safer/better place for house-less residents.
Note: Although the target audience will eventually be mobile application users, the constraint of the development window for this class suggests that a web-app framework will be the best to quickly get out a prototype of the project functionality before the term ends.
OVERVIEW:
-Allows users to identify their location to see nearby homeless shelters, shelters for domestic violence victims, woman and children.
- Connects them with community resources that provide access to essential resources such as food, shelter, clothing, toiletries, etc
-Has community boards/ forums where other people can connect and share community based information relating to issues of poverty, homelessness, safety or other community concerns.
- has a board members can post issues of safety concerns and report potental safety incidents to other PDX-HEO members. once this gets ported to a mobile framework we will introduce an interactive safety map a safety map where people can mark their locations and allow other mobile users to receive push notifications about safety concerns based upon their current location. In either case, it will be essential to post a message recommended users contact the proper safety channels to report the incidents and provide a link for users to easily contact non-emergency or emergancy services related to the incident type reported. (will suggest services such as portland respond and cheirs).
FEATURES: -Shelter finder -allows user to input address or location. Shows list of shelters that are sortable by location, type, etc
-Resource/non-profit finder
**UI: Interactive map with list of services
-filter resources by:
service-type:
-housing resources
-food/meal resources
-essentials
-education resources
-safety
-misc: counseling /legal advice/
location:
-community members can refer new organizations –
-community members can rate organizations and provide comments and feedback
-Community outreach
-Forum/community board
- members share and discuss community issues relating to poverty, housing, safety, and
any other community concerns.
-Safety map
-members can pin their location and post message stating if they are experiencing safety concerns.
- users can mark their location and express safety concerns – the goal of this is to allow citizens to be able to post safety concerns about citizens (house-less or otherwise) without having to approach the resident to see if they need help. It will be essentially to provide a message and a link to encourage users to contact emrgancy/non-emergency services so they can also report the incident to the proper channels.
-Connect members with non-emergency services
-cheirs
- Portland respond
-testmonies
- about
IMPLEMENTATION:
This project will start out as web-app with the goal to port the project to a mobile platform after the course has ended. We are still exploring which programming languages this application will be built with but we will be using docker-containers as our container platform.
This project will maintain a database of the businesses/services that we will use in our shelter/resource finder. Exploring sql vs postgress.
MOTIVATION:
Resources for house-less residents:
- Cell phones can be a life-line for house-less residents and surveys suggest that many house-less residents have easy access to smart-phones. The goal of this project is to make it as simple and as user-friendly as possible for vulnerable residents to quickly find and access essential resources they need.
Resources for concerned citizens:
-As someone who spends a lot of time walking around downtown portland, I have encountered many situations where a house-less resident seemed to need help but wasn’t having a medical emergency. I was unsure of what the best way to help was at the moment because of a fear of escalating the situation further for the person by contacting the police. There are non-profit organizations in Portland that exist to serve this purpose but I was not aware of that at the time. The goal of this project is to make it easy for residents to take the appropriate action to best help people while being ability to feel confident that their decision to help fits on.
TEAM MEMBER:
Leading Contributers: - Mackenzie Wangenstein - Andy Mayer - Chitradevi Maruthavanan