3 Years later it’s NING + Twitter + Craig’s List + for New Orleans Help w/ Hurricane Gustav

Haiti Before Hurricane Gustav

UPDATE: See Gustav Wiki for clearinghouse of info on Gustav.

The folks who post on Twitter have sprung into action over Hurricane Gustav and New Orleans. They’ve publicized that an ad hoc social network using the popular NING white-label software has been created to help those affected by the storm to connect and help one another. Perhaps Twitter, with it’s up-to-the-minute capabilities, will supercharge information flow about the online tools that worked back in 2005: A Wikipedia page, repurposing Craig’s List (with Craig Newmark’s blessing of course), and good old cell phone technology. All these were examples of social and collaborative technologies being used or re-used to assist with the humanitarian efforts of relief agencies, or simply to help one person assist another directly.

Right now, people like Tim Street, Nicole Jordan, Peter Shankman, and Craig Newmark are sending message bursts to their followers on Twitter to publicize the NING Gustav site. I’m not sure who set it up, but kudos to that person! 

UPDATE: Andy Carvin set up the NING site (@acarvin on Twitter) at the suggestion of Wayne Sutton, who is also active in these efforts. Thanks to @jazzychad on Twitter for compiling a Hurricane Gustav Twitter Tracker to help us follow the updates, which will, in turn, help the helpers to get the word out in other ways (many of those affected do not use Twitter). Andy Carvin has also lead the way for a wiki page of Gustav Twitter resources; read his blog post about all this for even more resources, like the Gustav Wiki, fashioned after the Katrina wiki.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2005 about the Tsunami & Wikipedia/online collaboration, as a guest blogger on the North Star Leadership Group website, at the request of Adam Carstens and John Beck:

(it can also be accessed via archives here)

October 25, 2005

Information Helps in Disaster Relief

By [Michael] Liskin 

The current U.S. citizenry is often called apathetic and cynical. Yet I suggest that we are witnessing a surge of ad-hoc opportunities for those in our nation—and the world—who have always wanted to get involved in direct social or political action but lacked the knowledge, the time or the proximity to do much good.

Take, for example, the East Asian Tsunami. The coordination of recovery attempts for the tsunami produced a catalytic event in that it brought forth ad-hoc efforts to repair telecommunications, help displaced people, and rebuild a stronger disaster preparedness network through the use of the newer communication technologies: blogs, wikis, and more sophisticated web sites. This has not only redefined how we deliver aid to those in need, but it has fundamentally altered the speed-of-reaction time that is expected of information organization and retrieval in times of crisis. James Robertson writes:

…As the beginnings of a massive relief effort were co-ordinated and aid began flowing into affected regions, [Peter Griffin] realised that the response lacked a vital element - information.

With Paola di Maio, Dina Mehta and a small group of internet contributors, many from tsunami-affected areas, [Peter] Griffin established SEA-EAT, the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami weblog…

With more than two million visits since it was established this month, it has fast become the online clearinghouse for information and contact details.

This phenomenon was largely repeated during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—but this time there were too many sites. Wikipedians came to the rescue with a clearinghouse page to serve as a meta-page that collected information from all the other web pages. But you cannot just use hyperlinks and call it a day. Somebody would have to enter the data in order to make it searchable. This called for massive collaboration.

People from the U.S. and around the world changed the notion of what it means to help in times of disaster. Those that would not have had the time or resources to help out in the traditional manner were able to pitch in from the comfort of their own home. They collaborated on a master disaster database for hurricane survivors, aggregating from other sources to provide a centralized website to help families locate their loved ones and provide important news and information. Just a few hours of data entry can go a long way to help a survivor locate their family. By leveraging the networking power of the Internet, the organization emerged to replace an unprepared and malignantly incompetent FEMA.

The master database collaboration was conducted through the open, free Internet encyclopedia—Wikipedia–a collaborative tour-de-force in it’s own right. After this aggregation page on Wikipedia provided an initial departure point for those in need, Yahoo.com and other portal sites stepped in to provide other meta-resource pages that include links to such information-rich sources as CraigsList New Orleans.

In many ways the distributed meta-data entry project was an ad-hoc collaborative effort in response to a government communication preparedness failure. Citizen stepped in to help fellow citizen, in a manner and with a tone not far from that of the open-source software movement itself. To borrow slang from Malcolm Gladwell, I proclaim that the use of new information and communication technologies in epic disasters has finally tipped.