Hurricane Katrina - my year (Part 5)
When we kicked off the Katrina Evacuee Help Center in response to hurricane Katrina, we managed to very quickly (as in hours) build a team from throughout the Open Source software community. Our team was made up of volunteers from Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, and of course, me here in New Zealand. To provide a "one stop" resource for the people affected by the hurricane was an enormous task - one we could not have done without the dedication and goodwill of a large number of volunteers. Managing the team and a project that was reactionary, rather than planned in advance, AND developing the site and software in real time on a live site that was serving hundreds of thousands of people was something no sane developers would do if they had time to think! A software developer said to me afterwards, "we were so busy making it happen, we didn't have time to think it was impossible".
It could not have happened if we were not developing open source software. Between us, we knew a lot of other developers, a lot of scripts, and what could be done with PHP, MySQL, and a Linux system running Apache. We were able to utilise existing scripts and where we had needs not met through existing code, we wrote our own. Some of this code has gone out to the world in other open source development. The power of collaborative development with free, open source code really came into its own with disastersearch.org.
There are thousands of disaster response, humanitarian, and aid agencies out there. At a simplistic level, it appears that technology is often considered by this type of organisation as being useful tools in assisting them to do what they already do. For many of them, lack of skills and experience with computer technologies severely limits their ability to utilise anything more than email. Our perspective was very different.
Many on our team had followed the reports that came through after the Asian tsunami. Some of us had spent time online, searching hospital records for news of friends caught up in that disaster. We all knew that databases for registering missing people and keeping track of those injured, expatriated, or deceased were supposed to have been developed. We were somewhat amazed to find that given the lessons of the tsunami, no government agency had developed these systems. I said, "somewhat" because, as developers, we also know that developing proprietary, in-house software takes a long time and usually a large budget.
All of us can sit around and discuss things we may have done in any given situation. In our case, we talked about what should be done and how. Then, just did it. This was taking the "geek" perspective and knowing how technology can be used to assist people. While Mac and his team were setting up wireless WAP access and getting cellphones into shelters in the disaster areas of Mississippi and Louisiana, the Dallas Linux User Group was getting PC's into shelters, and we were getting volunteers, also into shelters, to take missing persons registrations. Other organisations sent in volunteers who were taking registrations for the Red Cross and entering the same data into our database. Some evacuees sought to have their records ONLY in our database due to privacy concerns.
This combination of grass-roots efforts by "geeks" proved to be extremely powerful. We had people in areas with no power, no telephone access, yet accessing the internet through WAP-enabled cellphones and able to not just register their missing loved ones, but let others know that they were safe. Shelters were able to announce their availability, their capacity, and their need for volunteers and supplies. We are not aware that shelters have ever had access to this service in the past. Collaboration and co-ordination occurred dynamically, through grass-roots person-to-person interaction.
Technology was also used to create our virtual headquarters. While we did use email to get messages around the team, our primary means of communication has been Skype. Through real-time text messaging and our internet telephony, we worked as closely together as if we were sharing an office. It didn't matter where any of the team was located in the world. The advantage too, of having a team scattered around the globe, is that we covered almost all timezones. Being able to work on the software for the site 24/7, and being available to those who were using our services 24/7 proved to be of value to those who needed our services.
This is the fifth instalment of my series on hurricane Katrina and my involvement with disastersearch.org. I will be writing more in the next few days.
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