Collect survival information through a web application with social networking functionality, with the intent to help victims to master critical situations during and after a disaster.
Even easy tasks can be very hard during and after a disaster, when regular tools, water, electricity and gas might not be easily available, or not available at all. So many people have experienced such a situation and had to find a way to make things work somehow. The experience they gathered may help others to prepare better, master this kind of situations easier or enable them even to survive.
Social information exchange, such as Twitter, Facebook, is a very good fit for exchanging experiences people had during a disaster, and how they mastered it or failed. A specific web application using such social network functionality would make it possible to collect such information from all the places where disaster happened and make it available to everybody worldwide in as many languages as possible.
Our proposing application has four functions: 1)Input, 2)Search, 3)View, and 4)Modification. We call input information as "idea", which might contain texts and pictures (photos or drawings) and describe how to solve the issues.
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Input functions arrows us to input our ideas with tags and disaster type icons(symbol). Disaster type icons are representing disaster types, such as Earthquake, Tsunami, Typhoon, etc.
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Search function provides full-text search, and also provides information access from clicking tag(s) and/or disaster type icons. At the disaster time, this search function provides another specific function - showing "hot ideas in the area". We think that at the disaster time, users do not have much time and want to access ideas which can solve their issues as soon as possible. And so many people would have "same" issue at the same time and same location. "hot ideas in the area" shows the ideas which are accessed very frequently at the time and the location.
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View function allows us to view a idea, tags and disaster type icons. It also provides social communication functions, such as rating, adding comments and sharing other social tools (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
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Modification function is a most important and specific function of this tool. This function allows us to add information to an original idea, and also allows us to replicate and modify the original idea as well - like just translate from original language to other languages, and add some local gradients, and so on. Anyone can modify the original ideas like Wikipedia and replicate them in very social way.
Our project vision is to provide a place for people around the globe to share and learn about critical and dangerous situations during and directly after disasters, to be better prepared and survive when a disaster strikes.
We are drafting Product Requirement Document and Functions Document. The drafts are below: