SMS service to receive text messages to inform I'm OK

[Tokynet]

Create a website/app that folks can:
As a person in PR, I can send a text to say I'm ok (Fields needed, Name, Pueblo, more?)
As a person outside of PR, I want to check if my family members are ok.

The idea is, we create a friendly SMS number that is easy to remember and pass around, maybe get Jay Fonseca and other media to give the number out.

Create a website that displays the data in an organized way (maybe 0.0.1 is just alphabetical order)
Same as above, have media Jay Fonseca + FB give out the URL for diasporicans to go query for their family.

A good "nice to have" will be away to import a CSV? then we can get lists from Municipalities of people that are in the shelters, we could "safely" assume those are safe.

Suggestions? Ideas?

[ghost]

https://google.org/personfinder/2017-maria/
hay mucha data recopilada aqui y aguanta subir fotos + descripcion de la persona y busqueda, pero no se como sacar la data

[miguelrios]

See https://github.com/SoPR/maria-tech-brigade-effort/wiki/Snail-Safety-Check. We got an API key from Google to access, write to the Person Finder DB. Please, let's use that database as the central place where where people look for their loved ones. This is a great idea to gather data tho. Let's figure out how to input to Person Finder from the SMS data.

[miguelrios]

Reach out in Slack. I can give you the key privately. The API docs are in https://github.com/google/personfinder.

[Tokynet]

But is this something that requires a data connection on the devices of the people in PR?
I would rather NOT depend on data connection.
SMS service should become available sooner than full-blown data connection.

[oldmud0]

How about from voice calls as well? Don't know if the satellite phones that are being passed around for free by the government support SMS.

[miguelrios]

@Tokynet Do you mean the part where people mark themselves as "safe" or the part where family members look for others? The latter needs a connection today. An idea is to integrate with Person Finder so people send SMS like "looking for FULANO DE TAL in Orocovis" and they receive a text with the closest record in Person Finder. For the other side my point is that if people mark themselves as safe through SMS let's ensure that data gets syndicated with Person Finder so we have a centralized DB.

[Tokynet]

Well, I was thinking of a website that would just display the names/location of people that sent an SMS to its service. The site would just display data (maybe sort by town then lastname?
I just feel its better to depend on SMS for now VS data connections that might come back later.

But yes, once we have the data, exporting it as CSV should not be that hard, then we can push it or parse it and pipe it through People Finder too.

[karmacelina]

@miguelrios Regarding your idea,"to integrate with Person Finder so people send SMS like "looking for FULANO DE TAL in Orocovis" and they receive a text with the closest record in Person Finder.",
I created a couple of records for friends and family members that I haven't reached yet in PR in the Person Finder site. If I make a typo writing the name, the response I get from the site is that no records were found, even with edit distance 1. Are we going to look for closest records using some kind of edit distance metric? I might have written Python code for that at some point in the past.

[ecrespomit]

Acabo de ver esto en el Person Finder de Mexico... saben si es un feature incluido en Person Finder? O fueron Devs de Mexico incluyéndolo?

[miguelrios]

Buena pregunta. Le puedo escribir al equipo de crisis response de Google a ver.

[rexcartagena]

Saludos, yo trabaje este site el sábado pasado: http://www.smspr.net/smspr/

Creo que puedo modificar una versión para que trabaje según este issue.