(From Westpac.com.au)

Wiki technology brings practical help to Victorian Bushfire survivors

Internet technologies couldn’t help save nearly 200 men, women and children from losing their lives in Victoria’s bush fires last Saturday week. Nor could they prevent 7000 people becoming homeless overnight.

The schools, kindergartens, churches, shops, police stations and other buildings that were completely destroyed in a few short hours would not have been saved by the smarter use or deployment of web 2.0 technologies. Even more widespread use of the newest new thing - Twitter – wouldn’t have stopped the destruction.

The fires were too big, too hot, and moving too rapidly for anything much to be able to be done, by anyone, anywhere - years of drought, unprecedented high temperatures and strong northerly winds combined as never before to generate awesome firestorms in the Victoria bush.

There are clearly lessons to be learnt. One of them may be that whilst human technology is wonderful, and very powerful, ultimately, we all live at the whim of fundamental forces of nature.

Even so, Internet and online technologies have proved surprisingly useful in helping deal with the aftermath of that terrible afternoon and evening.

As this story is being written, more than $100million has already been raised in donations, mostly collected online and via the official Federal and State government backed Red Cross appeal.

Other charities and organisations too, are using their own web-site and online services to raise funds for bush fire survivors such as the St. Vincent de Paul Society - the Vinnies.

Some charities are using aggregated or peak body services such to raise funds online for their bushfire related appeals. Indeed the aggregated service at ourcommunity is currently hosting donations pages for 18 different online Victorian bushfire appeals, including specialist appeals related to kindergartens, wildlife, pets, bushfire research etc.

These various online donations pages are providing many Australians in other states and overseas with a real and practical way of helping.

Numerous other web-sites have also sprung up to help support the thousands who have lost everything in the fires.

Radio station and official emergency broadcaster, ABC local radio 774 Melbourne, via its web-site, had a message board set-up very quickly to handle the enormous influx of offers of material help. But the board soon overloaded and once the Red Cross and its call centre became the officially-designated focus for all bushfire related information services, the ABC closed the board and handed off the task.

Even so, telephone based services aren’t the only way to enable people to make and take advantage of offers of material help and support.

Indeed one enterprising and innovative approach that we here at eCommerce Report have been happy to endorse is a wiki hosted by the Fitzroy Oxfam group.

Like the most famous wiki of them all – Wikipedia – anyone can put an entry into the bushfire support registry. They don’t have to register first, nor learn a sophisticated user interface, or plough through a complicated set of instructions. You just do the obvious thing and either create an entry detailing your offer (and your contact details) or you create an entry detailing what you need.

Craig Reardon from theeteam.com.au set up this wiki. And it really is a quick and simple service connecting survivors with those who want to help them.

There are other bushfire related online initiatives that have come to our attention and which we’d like to mention here.

The first is prompted by the fact that the picturesque and popular tourist town of Marysville is now almost completely gone and the local historical society has lost all their photos.

To help prevent its former glory from being too easily lost and forgotten, a web-site has been set-up on the free photography hosting service - Flickr. Anyone with photographs of Marysville is welcome to post them to the special page you can find in the Groups section.

Finally, we’d like to mention a site being constructed to connect the small community who sent their children to the Marysville kindergarten. Please enjoy the site but please also respect their privacy at this most difficult time.

www.trianglefamily.com.au
www.flickr.com/groups/marysvillepre2009/
www.redcross.org.au
www.fitzroyoxfam.org.au
http://bushfireaid.wikispaces.com/
www.theeteam.com.au
www.vinnies.org.au
www.abc.net.au
www.ourcommunity.com.au
www.wikipedia.org