Two days ago I received an email notifying me that I had been nominated as New Zealand’s Open Source Ambassador in the forthcoming New Zealand Open Source Awards, and that I had been judged a finalist. I was both honoured and humbled by this news and decided to share it with some colleagues.

“Oh, yeah, we knew that”, was the response. It seems that nominations have been a hot topic across the web and while I knew about the awards, I did not take the time to read any of the press releases or postings on various websites. It seems others had and “my” news had been reported in Computerworld on 13th September. You can read the article online here: Computerworld New Zealand

“If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do.”
anon. (Often attributed to comedian Lucille Ball, but known as far back as William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

It seems a lot of people have taken that old saying to heart and the demands on my time have been rather heavy in the past month. Since returning from July’s Local Government Conference in Dunedin (with a good dose of norovirus to recover from) time has just raced away. I’m never much good with enforced rest, which may be why it took me a couple of weeks to recover from norovirus, but as soon as I was back to normal I found my days completely filled. The Standard has been reasonably good lately in reporting back on civic events and on council meetings so I won’t bore you by writing about those.

I had finished my series about hurricane Katrina and my involvement with Disastersearch. Tonight, however, I added a message to the disastersearch.org site. Two new registrations have come in today and while I was adding my brief message, 43 people were on the site, searching for missing people. There is a candlelight vigil in New Orleans tonight. I have my own candle lit here. It is a National Day of Remembrance in the US today. It’s also an ordinary day with council meetings here, for me. If any day where people are still missing is ordinary. While people remember, others are still searching for loved ones. While people celebrate life, others just need a home.

This is the final post in my series about hurricane Katrina and my involvement with Disastersearch. It is probably also the hardest one to write. Today is the anniversary of hurricane Katrina making landfall on the Gulf Coast states of the US. The hurricane completely destroyed a large area across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The resultant flooding and failure of the levees destroyed a large part of New Orleans. Those of us who were not there can never understand the emotional and psychological impact on those who were directly affected. Today is an emotional day for me, but I cannot even begin to imagine how it is for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were turned upside down by this catastrophy. A year ago, a disaster was about to strike. A year on, the disaster continues.

The past year has been rather bizarre. Due to the demands of building and managing the Disastersearch website and its team of volunteers, and working to help those people affected by the disasters of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, my life became one of balancing my role with Disastersearch and my role as a city councillor. In many ways, the two roles are not that far apart.

Hurricane Katrina - my year (Part 6)

We were dealing with hundreds of thousands of people who were being scattered all over the US in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, but, silly me, I did not realise in mid-September that our task in locating missing people was about to get much harder.

While we were busy on the Katrina Evacuee Help Center, I kept a watch on tropical storm alerts from NOAA. Hurricane Rita formed as a tropical storm over the Turks and Caicos Islands on September 18. The storm reached Category 2 intensity as it moved south of the Florida Keys on September 20. Rapid intensification ensued as Rita moved into the Gulf of Mexico, and Rita became a Category 5 hurricane on the 21st, becoming the third (at that time) most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. People who had been evacuated to shelters suddenly found those shelters evacuating ahead of hurricane Rita. People whose location we had found, were on the move, without the means to let family and friends know.

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.

When hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on 29th August last year, it did enormous damage to Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Hurricane damage reached far inshore and many communities were devastated. Well over a million people had evacuated ahead of the storm but in some parishes, there were people who choose to ride it out. This may be difficult for people in New Zealand to understand. However, hurricanes are not infrequent events and evacuation can be difficult. For people with their own transport, there are still the problems of obtaining fuel, getting supplies, and boarding up houses. Many people had ridden out bad hurricanes before and come to no harm. It is easy from a distance and with hindsight to say, "I would have evacuated", but unless you live in an area that gets these warnings, you really don’t know what you would do. High temperatures, lack of fuel supplies, hours upon hours in traffic gridlock, and knowing that as you head North accomodation will be quickly filling with the other million or so getting out are good reasons to think twice. We must also remember that nothing is certain about where a hurricane will make landfall until just a matter of hours before.

Perhaps this entry should be titled, “Hurricane Katrina and experiences with bureaucracy”. Every person affected by hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has horror stories to tell about their dealings with bureaucracy. We found that with the Disastersearch site, even the helpers ran into brick walls of red tape.

When the site launched, we had two unique features that were offered through private areas of the site, secured from the rest of the world. Those who saw our first press releases would have seen this comment:

Other features of the web site include a private section designed for triage personnel. People had lost their medical records and we were seeing situations where triage doctors were prescribing medication with no way of alerting other medical personnel of the treatment. We saw a need for temporary records which could only be accessed by medical staff, so we created it.Disastersearch Press Release

Now, although we received support from doctors and from the heads of some medical professional organisations, we could not get past the red tape to allow any triage personnel to use the medical records system. We understood the difficulties of intermittent WAP cellphone access and the demands on the time of the medical personnel on the ground in the affected areas, but we also knew that people were receiving inappropriate treatment due solely to a lack of any records-keeping. This became even more apparent when evacuations started following the hurricane. People were being treated at one location, then treated again at their destination. Traumatised people are not necessarily able to recall exactly what drugs they have been given, nor can they be relied on to remember the names of any treatments they were on previously.

I started writing this blog entry to let off steam over those few in Palmerston North who are sending me messages, whining about the fact that I am part of a small team that has created an amazing resource for those affected by hurricane Katrina. Apparently, they have assumed that this means I am not honouring my responsibilities to Palmerston North. Isn’t it always the squeaky wheels making the most noise that people notice?

I’m not writing more about them except to say that those people who have shown their complete lack of compassion for others, and a preference for making swipes at me, will get no explanation or apology from me for anything I am doing.