A website set up by open source developers connects Ukrainian refugees in France with individuals and initiatives that want to give those fleeing shelter. Open source made it go live just days after the invasion.
In a quick response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and consequent refugee wave, the project Find-Shelter website was set up. So far limited to France, the developers of the project have set out to gather and structure the contact information of French people who expressed desire to help and specifically give shelter to ukrainians refugees.
The developers heard the many French people who stated on the radio, television and in newspapers that they wanted to host Ukrainian refugees. The specific problem the project is trying to solve is that their contact information was not efficiently gathered in one place to be found by the refugees.
Find-Shelter does this by gathering the information from four different services which is then passed on to government or non-for-profit associations and organisations that are in direct contact with refugees. The information is gathered by encouraging French citizens and residents to add their details to the services, and it also provides some basic information for the shelter-givers about the visa status and the need for a residence visa application if the refugee aims to stay for more than 90 days.
The website is fully open source, with the front-end built with VueJS and hosted on Netlify, and with the back-end built with NodeJS and. hosted on Heroku. Any developer can access the code and participate via their GitHub repository. The code is published under an MIT licence.
The services aimed at potential French hosts that visitors to Find-Shelter.com can navigate to are EU4UA, the Pour l'Ukraine website by the French government, and AirBnB’s Ukraine initiative. Moreover, they linked to Pryhystok (Прихисток, shelter in Ukrainian), which a Ukrainian Member of Parliament set up in order to coordinate the system of compensation for Ukrainians hosting internally displaced persons. “Citizens of Ukraine over the age of 18 who own residential premises and place internally displaced persons in these premises free of charge”.
Find-Shelter.com shows the breadth of the initiatives in France, where NGOs, individual volunteers, the government and multinational corporations are providing support. With the numbers of refugees and people expressing their desire to help, the technical assistance to match these people together seems to be an important cause. The role of open source software is to enable all these different organisations to collaborate quickly and efficiently.