Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Australian Fire Maps released!

It's fire season in Australia. My state in particular, Queensland, tends to catch fire quite a lot. I know this because I recently worked for the state government and built them a bushfire tracking system.

One almost as good as the system I built for you.


This app integrates data from the following sources:


You will note that the Northern Territory is absent from this list. There are reasons.



2 comments:

  1. This is very good. I seem to recall a conversation we had many months ago where we agreed a system like this could be built by one person in a couple of weeks rather than tasking an entire government department with building an in-house system useful only to government employees.

    I'm glad you've done this, despite my concerns I spoke of on Facebook. It well demonstrates the overarching points I've been going over for years:
    Everyone benefits _most_ when *everyone* benefits.
    Free, open, and public is the best way of doing things. Far better than tendered, closed, 'secure' methods. Governments needs to adopt these new approaches and without nimble, ethical management approaches to problem-solving involved in building these sorts of information systems entire government departments DESERVE to be cut to the bone until they ARE willing to solve problems using the best tools known (rather than constantly reinventing the wheel).

    So, thank you for this! Well done! :) Hopefully it will garner some decent publicity, although you may find that like my new ideas, erecting the billboard is one thing, getting people to look at it is quite another. :(

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