As If It Matters

Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath continues to haunt the rest of America. I’m on several different email discussion groups – especially ones that have to do with political organizing and technology – and they are all talking about how to solve this problem (thanks to SoRo for the link). This morning on Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, Tim Bishop outlined the problem: “create a single database of all the people missing in the aftermath of Katrina that their friends and family can use to connect with them”. Turns out that there are already a number of options springing up, from the Katrina PeopleFinder Project to a CivicSpace effort to Wal-mart’s own attempt to help. But the one that made me choke up a bit was the Lost and Found section of Craig’s List New Orleans – mostly because it reminds me of Sept. 11 in New York City, people desperately searching for their loved ones.

There is also a mailing list for on-going discussion of technical response to emergency events; I’m not on it myself, and don’t know what it’s like: Digital-ER. But let’s return to the PeopleFinder project, which a number of my friends and colleagues are involved with. Noting that the Red Cross fulfills much the same function, the PeopleFinder project has a page explaining why they’re doing this:

This entry was posted on September 5, 2005 at 9:29 pm and is filed under TechFun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.