Case study · Web platform
Find Them DM
Dominica's missing-person alerts lived on social media, where they scrolled away within hours and outdated posts kept circulating after people were found. Find Them DM gives every case one permanent, searchable, shareable home, and gives the people managing them a secure place to work.
- Client
- Independent community service
- Scope
- Design, development, deployment
- Platform
- Public site + staff portal
- Stack
- Django · PostgreSQL · Docker
The problem
When someone goes missing in Dominica, the alert spreads through Facebook and WhatsApp. That reach is valuable, but posts are hard to find a day later, details change between copies, and nobody can tell whether a forwarded alert is still current.
The goal was a single trusted place: easy to search on any phone, built to be shared, clear about who has been found, and run by a small team who must be confident nothing goes public by mistake.
The public site
Search & filters
Search by name, nickname or community. Filter by alert type, parish and dates.
Colour-coded alerts
Cases follow the national alert classifications, so each one shows at a glance who is missing.
Share anywhere
One-tap WhatsApp, Facebook and X sharing, plus printable posters with a QR code to the live page.
"Located" banners
Found people are clearly marked, so old alerts stop circulating, with a public timeline of updates.
Feeds for media
RSS feeds let newsrooms and partners pick up new alerts and updates automatically.
Fast on any connection
Server-rendered pages with no heavy front-end framework, so they load quickly on mobile data.
Screens
The staff portal
Behind the public site is a portal where staff create and manage cases. Nothing reaches the public without a second pair of eyes: cases move from draft to review to approval to publication, and the person who submits a case can't approve it.
Staff have roles (case managers, publishers and auditors). Sign-in uses two-factor authentication, and an audit trail records every change, by whom and why. Edits to live cases wait for approval, uploaded photos have their location data stripped, and private notes never appear publicly.
Everything an agency would want to change (name, logo, colours, police contact) is a setting, so the platform can be adopted by an official body without rewriting code. A separate demo mode with fictional records lets prospective partners try the whole workflow safely.
Built with
Screens are from the demonstration site. Every person shown is a fictional sample record.
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