More than 200 developers including from Google, Facebook and Twitter joined on February 16 to work on app improvements to help public responses to the UK floods. The event was hosted by Tech City UK.
The apps specialists worked on ideas for information exchange for flood relief efforts and data visualization applications that present flood information. A couple were shortlisted: the Twitter handle @FludBud giving information on volunteering for flood relief, “Who Do I call when I have a power cut?”, Flood Feeder, Don’t Panic (a system to centralize requests for help), UKFloodAlerts (allows people to post all sorts of alerts relevant to flooding) and Citizen Flood Journalism (automates the process of finding people tweeting, by asking them to share additional photos or information about the surroundings).
The event was a reaction to the UK Government's call to the tech community to use the stored data on floods they have for relief efforts. Many of the solutions and apps are already online and providing support in the flooded South England areas.
