Desperately Seeking Dhaka?

DESPERATELY Seeking Dhaka started when Nazia was looking for swimming diapers for babies in Bangkok's desperately seeking group.
Nazia Tariq is a fashion designer by profession and is the CEO of her brand “11”. She travelled often to Singapore and Bangkok, and found that the “desperately seeking” groups of these cities were coming to good use and were very helpful.
During the same time, she thought she would do the same in Dhaka and that is when -- less than a year ago on 16 July, 2013 -- Desperately Seeking Dhaka (DSD) was born.
On DSD you can post vacancies, search for jobs, buy and sell personal goods, post events, property rentals and sales, etc.
It started with a few friends and family that Nazia invited. The idea was to create a common platform so that the seekers could get quick information and there is not a better platform than Facebook.
As the group got bigger slowly, during late last year some of Nazia's friends told her about another group which was called 'deshperate' which is for expats and you need to know a member to be invited. Nazia's idea was not to be exclusive but to be inclusive for rational reasons as the more people it has, the more information it will carry.
More people started joining and it was becoming resourceful. Today, there are about 100 odd posts by people seeking and about 10 times more people trying to address the search query -- in short, DSD has become the equivalent of a Google search for Dhaka on Facebook. It is still at its growing stage but the growth has taken Nazia by surprise.
She says “Active and dedicated members who really want to help others… its people with that kind of intention that made DSD so useful”. In the meantime, success has its costs too. There is no shortage of spammers in Bangladesh; any social media literate person knows this. Spammers are from a range of different businesses starting from entrepreneurs initiating their baking careers to Pakistani lawn retailers. Nazia had to take decisions based on the needs of the group users and a set of ethics to decide what to keep and what to take off.
The past couple of months have been great for DSD. It's a big community of almost 9000 people sharing information with each other and this group has members from different socio-economic strata of life with one thing in common -- a Facebook account.
Nazia plans to make the group more effective for people so that more people can get its benefits. The goal is not defined yet by DSD as they plan to take it slowly with time. Right now, Nazia is looking for motivated moderators for DSD who can support her in an effort to optimise and maximize DSD and create a larger and more effective community.
She is also looking for app developers so that DSD can be accessed through a smart phone app as most people use their phones to access the Internet.
Desperately Seeking Srilanka was born from DSD which shows the scale of reach and effect that DSD has. For those looking for context-specific, first-person advice that may not be available on Google, you might want to try out Desperately Seeking Dhaka on Facebook.