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"Couch surfing just got a whole new meaning. Sparkrelief, a new non-profit aimed at disaster relief, has built a special portal where people can offer up their homes or apartments as surrogate shelters for people displaced by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It's crowdsourced couch surfing for a cause.\nBuilt in a little more than 3 days, the site immediately received 40 submissions with the numbers doubling by the following week. That number may seem small, but it's a huge step for the non-profit. The Japan earthquake is the first international crisis that Sparkrelief has assisted. \nThe impact extends far beyond simply providing temporary shelter, says founder Eli Hayes. Each family or individual given shelter reduces strain on relief infrastructure like community shelters, food and water supplies, and other basic amenities like clean clothing or showers. \"If you target the housing issue, you solve all those other problems too,\" Hayes says.\n\nThe support, however, goes well beyond providing people with shelter. \"[In a disaster], you've lost your sense of community,\" Hayes says. \"What happens when you go into someone's house and they take you in and start cooking you breakfast in the morning is that you have that community back again.\"\nThe need for community support in a disaster is something that Hayes knows intimately. He and his brother were displaced by a forest fire when he was growing up in Oakland. Hayes says they didn't know many people and couldn't afford to stay in a hotel. They ended up sleeping on someone's floor. Hayes became a firefighter and later joined the military. \nThen Boulder, Colorado was hit by a massive forest fire in September of 2010. Hayes started hosting displaced victims, but it was hard to gather information tacked up on bulletin boards across several shelters. So he assembled a small team and created a site to help provide information and shelter to those affected by the fire. Hayes took that model and applied it to the Japan earthquake. \"I'd like for it to be the single source for disaster information and relief,\" Hayes says.\nWhile most shelter offers have come from within Japan, there have also been offers to host from parts of Europe and North America. Hayes quickly got volunteers to help translate the site into Japanese to handle the bulk of their requests.\n\nAs well-intentioned as the initiative is, there are obvious risks. How do you guarantee living conditions, trustworthiness, or general safety? Hayes acknowledges the inherent risk, but believes his system no less dangerous than staying with a friend or romantic partner. Still, he hopes to include shelter contributions from local governments and NGO's. Unofficial offers could then be filtered out in an options menu. \nHayes is also encouraging users to set up meetings, calls, or Skype conversations before agreeing to take in or host someone. He plans to keep adding more features to guarantee credibility as the site expands and deals with other disasters.\nSparkrelief is just starting to get its legs, but Hayes plans to ramp up and provide relief for natural disasters in the future. \"There is no downtime,\" Hayes says. \"There are 13 major earthquakes every year; that's more than one a month.\" As a registered non-profit, Hayes isn't making any money from Sparkrelief and says he is funding his staff of three out of pocket. \nIf Hayes can improve his credibility measures and increase his audience, Sparkrelief can be a digital roof over many more displaced heads.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Akira Lai"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/sparkrelief-japan-earthquake/>