Today I had an awesome day at the first OpenDataBC hackathon which took place at Mozilla Labs Vancouver.

Tara Gibbs pitched this wonderful idea of consolidating shelter availability data and displaying it on a few window displays, so the homeless people living DTES would not waste their time going from one shelter to another just to find a free spot.

This doesn't solve all the problems of course, but it does solve a little yet very annoying one.

So... At 11:30 we had nothing but an idea. We discussed possible approaches for a while, then came David Eaves and suggested using Twitter as a message queue service.

At approximately 12:00 we still had nothing but a piece of paper covered with boxes and arrows, then we started coding. Tara did the frontend, I was busy hacking the backend and the Twitter stuff.

Four hours later we had a fully functional, production ready system - https://github.com/mikeivanov/vanshelter

How it is supposed to work:

1. Shelters tweet their availability data (they all have internet access)
2. VanShelter monitors -- each of them independently -- receive Twitter updates and
3. Refresh their displays when something changes.

For displays we can use cheap LCD monitors, probably even donated. The software will run on those amazing Raspberry thingies - http://www.raspberrypi.org/, $25 each. This brings the full cost of installing 10 displays down to $250+.

Thank you Tara and David. Also, thank you Jeff and all the people who made this hackathon possible.