Flowerdale Bushfire Recovery

By Flowerdale Community

Flowerdale was devastated by the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria. 13 people died, 224 houses were lost.

The community was desperate for help and was initially forgotten. See http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25033006-5018722,00.html

We have used social media and web 2.0 tools, like pbworks, blogger, vimeo and youtube, flickr to communicate, raise funds and build a temporary village and more importantly to help residents vision a safer and sustainable future.
See http://www.vimeo.com/4163527

When the town was destroyed we needed to build a temporary village, get help, build support and raise funds.

Social media has helped build a village in a few weeks, raise over $1.5 million, donations of goods like cars. It has also been crucial in keeping residents informed, liasing with media and government and maintaining a historical record. The Australian National Library has requested permission to keep the blog in the national archive.

We couldn't have coordinated the village with more than 20 organisations involved without the wiki.

Using free tools like blogger and the google gadgets made it very easy.

We let it evolve and just added things as we went. We didn't have the design resources to make it look good but it has been crucial to our success.

12th February, 2009 ongoing

Overall Rating: (9 votes)

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