Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Last week -- in the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina -- Joe Trippi posted on his blog a plea that people not engage in political debate about it, but rather just do something about it. It was a great post, concluding:

Right now there are 16 million blogs and millions who read them. The blogosphere has not yet found its true purpose -- helping to solve this crisis with creativity and energy must be part of the answer to finding it.

The net immediate effect on me was to force me to think hard about the problem. As far as the Internet is concerned, it's not just blogs, I realized, that offer the key to handling disasters of any given magnitude. There are actually a whole bunch of technologies to draw on. Here's what I proposed, in a more or less off-the-cuff comment to Trippi's post:

(a) A central Wiki database of questions and answers. (Wikis, for those unfamiliar with the term, are well-structured information repositories, heavily cross-referenced, which can be edited by anyone at all. Incompetently offered or wrong or misguided information doesn’t last long, because it’s immediately correctable by the thousands of others contributing to the Wiki. The best-know[n] Wiki is the online Wiki-based encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org.) Subjects currently requiring information can be highlighted. This could include disaster-preparation information as well as disaster-recovery info.

(b) Some way of getting questions IN. The main difficulty here is that not everyone has Internet access, and those with Internet access aren’t necessarily going to be where they can go online. A possible solution here would be to use volunteers at public and university librariess. Set up hotlines (and perhaps a dedicated workstation in each library). A phone call to the hotline may be immediately answerable, or at least will get the question recorded. The hotline must be operable 24×7 during an emergency.

(c) A set of RSS feeds (one for each category of disaster-related information) posting both questions and answers, retrievable by Internet-capable cell phones and wireless-enabled laptops as well as by static workstations.

(d) A mailing list for the volunteers working behind the scenes on the underlying technology.

(e) Maybe an FTP site for uploading photographs and other media.

(f) A blog presenting a public interface to all the above.

Some key pieces of the puzzle: All technology to support this is open-source (although the servers on which the site would live might cost some bucks, unless we could find one or more generous web hosting services to donate the requisite facilities). Thousands and thousands of volunteers needed, especially for redundancy at critical times, from the people editing the Wiki, to those manning phones at the local hotlines, to the technoids who are “system admin’ing” the whole thing.

Most importantly, the focus would be not on helping the victims directly, but on helping those who are in a position to help the victims directly -- and who can’t (for one reason or another) get official assistance when they need it.

Within a few hours, I'd gotten a reply back from one "Abbie," one of the people responsible for a site known as "Apathy Online. " Abbie was (is) offering DNS hosting for the project, at least in its early stages.

I've just registered a domain name for the service: reliefhub.org. It's only a one-year registration for now, because I need to have some confidence that the thing will actually take off.

(As I see it now, it would be wonderful if we could get something going to assist with Katrina's aftermath -- yet I believe it's important to remember the mid- to long-term goals as well. That's why I didn't try to come up with a Katrina-specific domain name.)

As far as the project's immediate needs, I see these:

1. Soliciting contact information for a core group of people to get the site's various components up and running as soon as possible. The primary qualification for this core is technological; as a tech-nerd kind of guy, I have some familiarity with a wide range of Internet technologies, such as (of course) email, blogging, and in particular setting up a WordPress blog. But I have in-depth familiarity with almost none of it. I have never set up a listserv, for instance. I have never set up a Wiki. How to solicit this contact information? Presumably through blogs and other sites that I have some familiarity with. (A related potential problem: Having a core group of 500 people is not a good idea. I have no firm concept of the ideal size, but I'm thinking roughly 10-15.)
2. The primary means of communication among the core group: a mailing list, "reliefhub_tech," which I have temporarily set up on Yahoo! Groups. Here's the information:
   Post messages to: reliefhub_techATyahoogroupsDOTcom
   Subscribe to list: reliefhub_tech-subscribeATyahoogroupsDOTcom
   Unsubscribe from list: reliefhub_tech-unsubscribeATyahoogroupsDOTcom
3. Once the underlying technology (blog, Wiki, RSS feeds) is in place, the next need will be for volunteers -- lots of them -- both as contributors to the ReliefHub Wiki and blog, and as offline assistants for those needing Internet access.

So now, you reading this, whoever you might be: If you can't see yourself contributing during the initial tech setup phase, please pass word of the project to anyone you might know who can contribute.

And if you need to email me, you can always do so (as the sidebar indicates) at whereleftisrightATearthlinkDOTnet. (Make the appropriate character substitutions, of course.)

Thanks!

(Btw, if you want to keep tabs on the project's status, you should be able to do so by searching this blog via Technorati.)