Local homeless (data) aid
Many homeless people would sleep in a shelter if such were available to them (nearby, open bed, would not steal their possessions).
Many homeless people have no cell phones or basic cell phones. Many use public library computers, when they can. It is very difficult to know which shelters have beds open without physically visiting the shelters in question (which is time consuming and can be insupportably expensive if using public transit).
There may be a niche for a SMS app which sends messages about which shelters are open and have beds (and shelter addresses). The user could reply to the text with a short string representing the shelter location and how many people would like to sleep there- i.e. one homeless person with a phone could send texts on the behalf of other homeless people without phones.
A web UI (intended for use at a public library terminal, for users without phones) could perform a similar function. No authentication would be necessary because no service is being bought or reserved; public data is being provided to the user, and interest is being indicated by the user.
This could improve the lives of some homeless people and increase the efficiency of homeless shelters (although this assumption is invalid if the shelters are already at capacity- in this case the app would serve to prove/show by how much demand is outstripping supply for shelter beds)
I don't know as much about this space as I should so I hope that this suggestion is not offensive if it is misguided. I am interested in hearing feedback and ideas on how to provide practical services and advances in this area.
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Linda commented
Additional notes: could use Twilio for sending SMS. Could use a rails (or sinatra or whatever) server to interpret and respond to messages with some kind of lightweight data-store to keep the shelter info in for easy retrieval.
The real challenge here is to aggregate the data and to do basic research with the individual shelters to find out
1. if they are willing to provide a near-real-time feed of how many open beds there are (possibly by a shelter administrator/helper via text message sent to the same app?
2. What data would be most useful to send out
etc (brainstorm more questions on-site)Possible app/team names- Shelterator, Datahome, BunkBroadcast, ShelterStatus