OTS has been lucky enough to work with the Red Cross of Chicago and Northern Illinois (CNI) for the past year and a half, thanks in large part to the civic data community at Chi Hack Night. With Jim McGowan, CNI’s Director of Planning and Situational Awareness, we developed the open source Smoke Alarm Request Portal, where you can request to have a volunteer come install a smoke alarm in your home for free.
Now we’re connecting the Smoke Alarm Request Portal to allReady, an open source platform for volunteer preparedness and coordination (part of the Humanitarian Toolbox suite of disaster preparedness and prevention tools). With help from both open source communities, the two applications will share data to simplify the process of scheduling smoke alarm installations. Continue reading “Sharing data across Red Cross projects: the Smoke Alarm Portal and allReady”