Refugee Info redux 2022.

Back in 2015-16 during the start of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece we worked on an interesting project with a number of other organisations (IRC, Google.org and others).
At the time we were working on the island of Lesvos where the majority of refugees were arriving in small boats coming from Turkey. We were one of the first organisations arrving on the island and had already installed a number of public wifi hotspots providing internet access to refugees and aid workers. The UN had also just asked us to build a public wifi network covering the yet to be built Kare Tepe refugee camp.
However only providing the means of access to information alone wasn’t sufficient. It became clear that a centralised portal site containing relevant data for refugees was a much better solution. So together with the above mentioned organisation such a site was developed. Disaster Tech Lab’s main role was that we set up this portal site as the landing page on all our wifi hotpsots on the island; this meant that the first page that anyone would see when connecting to the wife network was this portal site providing them all sorts of relevant data: where to get accommodation, what aid services were available, explanation about asylum procedures etc.
The portal content was made available in all relevant languages. It also had soem interesting tweaks; the page background was set to black with white text; this proved to cause significant less power consumption on the mobile devices used. That took into consideration the limited means of charging devices available to refugees. We also opted to stick to a web-based portal rather than an app as using an mobile application opened a cesspool of device and compatibility issues.

Fast forward to 2022 and we are now seeing a huge influx of refugees from Ukraine coming into Europe. Different location but same scenario. These people also need access to relevant data and they need it most at the points of entry. As we have already been placing public wifi hotspots in a number of locations in the Ukranian border regions it is only a logical step to revisit the approach taken in Greece. Hence this new project; we are going to develop and maintain a portal site containing information relevant to new (refugee) arrivals in the EU coming from Ukraine. One of the biggest challenges is going the geographical area to cover. There will be border crossings with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova to cover. While we will be working with other organisations on providing and maintaining the content our part will be the provision, installation and maintenance of the wifi hotspots.
All in all an ambitious project but one which has already proven it’s benefit.

We will need your help to make this a reality!
Costs such as hardware, internet acces, tools and others need to be covered.
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