Bushfire Connect is an online bushfire crisis service based on Ushahidi. It displays and manages real time emergency information submitted by local community members and emergency agencies. The goal is to establish a reliable, dynamic and timely resource for people in fire threatened or damaged areas to enhance and extend the utility of official data sources.
Bushfire Connect uses Ushahidi to aggregate information from multiple sources: official and social, about events and incidents such as community meetings, fires, and road closures, in a way that empowers anyone to contribute local knowledge and make informed decisions.
Bushfire Connect overcomes the limitations with the current, official fire alert services by improving timeliness and relevance of data by empowering tens of thousands of people to contribute a human intelligence stream of content including text, images and video.
The system is a central repository collecting crowd-sourced incident data and layering it with information from official sources.