National Housing Locator Presentation to DAS Feb. 14, 2008

Helping HUD Locate Habitable Disaster-Relief Housing ● NHLS Objectives – Identify available and habitable rental housing for temporary housing during disasters ● Users – Citizens – HUD Users – Disaster Centers ● Assets and Partners – HUD – Multi-Family & Single-Family Housing – Public Housing – Other Federal Assets – USDA & VA – Managed & Private Assets Lesson learned from Katrina: the U.S. government lacked a national inventory of available housing. Citizant completed the Concept of Operation and is delivering the application.

National Housing Locator System - Status Identify available temporary housing in the event of an emergency from existing housing data providers (Housing Locator) Mechanism to collect and make available temporary housing properties not already maintained by existing data providers (Housing Asset Collection) Process to manage and track housing aid provided to disaster victims (Housing Referral System)

Housing Locator Application Status  Created a simple and searchable interface  Established industry standard exchanges  Signed up data providers (Working w/ 34)  Behind HUD firewall Next Steps  Add more data providers  Add more geo-spatial features

Housing Asset Collection Status  Identified process flow to collect data from: Public Housing Authorities Multi-family Housing General public  Working with FEMA Next Steps  Continue to create a simple and easy mechanism to collect data from the local and state authorities  Mechanism to interface with other local data providers

Case Management/Customer Service Status  In process of gathering requirements  Disaster Voucher Program process/application to be used for HUD assisted case management  Studying portal technologies to provide seamless interface to track assistance provided Next Steps  Continue to gather requirements  Create and validate process flow

Inside NHLS Rich User Experience User Friendly Utilizes AJAX for fluid user navigation Commenting & Mapping system Desktop application look and feel under a distributed Web environment Rapid Application Development (RAD) Short iterative development cycles Developed using the RAD methodology Utilized an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to reduce development time Quick and flexible development Perpetual Beta Constantly accepting requirements Soliciting requirements direct from Users The NHLS team actively engages in communications with the end users to adapt NHLS to the changing needs Adaptive/Corrective Maintenance Long-Tail Approach to Data Collection Accept data from a large number of sources No data set is too small Ability to collect data from numerous sources to increase the total number of units available Data Mashups Utilizing Google’s map API as a data mashup platform Overlays Potential to display other overlays Displaying grouped data enhances overall user experience Web Service/REST Means of data exchange between systems Direct access to property data to outside organizations Transfer of data using a simple form of Web service Adhere to a standard transportation method

Lessons Learned Seek out industry standards  Met w/ industry and associations  Leverage existing standards (e.g. MITS Project)  Adopt a smaller sub-set Use standard interfaces  Inventory of existing services (e.g. Geo-coding, Maps & mashups)  Innovate and adopt Collaborate  Establish simple data exchange processes  Create simple trading partner agreements based around a common cause