One of the efforts ongoing in this horrific situation is coordination of missing persons efforts.
There’s a new site that David Geilhufe of the Social Source Foundation and others have pulled together at http://www.neworleansnetwork.org/ that has a “people finder” that can aggregate all the data they can get their hands on.
David says: “We need a plan/strategy for massively parallel distributed action….Basically there is all this unstructured data out on the web in forums and message boards. We want to get it in a central database along with the Red Cross database, Gulf Coast News (33k records) and
any other structured data we can find.
The big issue is how and where to coordinate a massively parallel volunteer effort. How do we make sure that four different people don’t enter the same five forum entries, creating a massively duplicate database? (some duplication is fine, but how do we minimize?)”
David–and this project– need help–contact him at david -AT- socialsourcefoundation -DOT- org if you can assist.
Meanwhile, Cyberjournalist is linking to a list of missing person and found lists pulled together by OJR readers in a wiki on the site. There’s an authoritative list at the Red Cross, here.
NowPublic is not only posting queries, but has suggestions on how to search for someone missing and how to place a missing notice. Also Andy Carvin has a site here.
My heart goes out to everyone caught up in this disaster, where help came too late and preparedness was sacrificed to budget, with alarming results.
One of the efforts ongoing in this horrific situation is coordination of missing persons efforts.
There’s a new site that David Geilhufe of the Social Source Foundation and others have pulled together at http://www.neworleansnetwork.org/ that has a “people finder” that can aggregate all the data they can get their hands on.
David says: “We need a plan/strategy for massively parallel distributed action….Basically there is all this unstructured data out on the web in forums and message boards. We want to get it in a central database along with the Red Cross database, Gulf Coast News (33k records) and
any other structured data we can find.
The big issue is how and where to coordinate a massively parallel volunteer effort. How do we make sure that four different people don’t enter the same five forum entries, creating a massively duplicate database? (some duplication is fine, but how do we minimize?)”
David–and this project– need help–contact him at david -AT- socialsourcefoundation -DOT- org if you can assist.
Meanwhile, Cyberjournalist is linking to a list of missing person and found lists pulled together by OJR readers in a wiki on the site. There’s an authoritative list at the Red Cross, here.
NowPublic is not only posting queries, but has suggestions on how to search for someone missing and how to place a missing notice. Also Andy Carvin has a site here.
My heart goes out to everyone caught up in this disaster, where help came too late and preparedness was sacrificed to budget, with alarming results.