Katrina Wikis Come To The Rescue

Alan Guterriez of Engine Room blog asked me to help spread word. Those that know either a bit about using wikis and/or about about the lay of the land in New Orleans are needed to help wiith organizational structure/information architecture and more. Check out the ThinkNola Wiki. He also lists other live news sources, blogs, wikis and forums too.

He also has a wikified a Hurricane Katrina Survivor Registry where folks can add survivors and list missing persons, and found persons by regions.

Hugh has more of Alan's thoughts online (here's a snippet):

Reporting has been given over to the media, and they are talking about the looting, the shooting, the crime. It's a great big show. It's anarchy, it's chaos. No information to be had.

But, in reality. There is A LOT of information to be had. It's simply not presented in a way that is at all useful to the citizens of New Orleans.

There are land lines working, SMS messages are working on cell phones, people are running all sorts of information through the http://nola.com/forums/ .

That's the problem. It scrolls off the screen and gets lost.

I gathered some of that information into a Wiki page. It was information about about Xavier University. A faculty member posted a list of trapped students. I formatted it and put it on a Wiki page.

Then people started to send me updates in e-mail. Someone thanked me for the page. So, I made point of gathering and formatting all the Xavier messages I could find onto the page.

The Xavier Wiki page became an unofficial web page, and kept it up until I couldn't stay awake any longer, and sadly, went to sleep.

When I awoke, I found that the Xavier families, has simply kept the Wiki page going without me. I cleaned up the their markup, buth the information is there.

Now, I'm finding the page gets updated, nice and neat.

http://thinknola.com/wiki/index.php?title=Xavier

Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina

Comments

[Alan Gutierrez]

Thank so much you Evelyn.

The Katrina Survivor Directory is growing.

http://familymessages.org/index.php

Dan Chaney, and Matthew Mccoy, amazing programmers, who I didn't know before yesterday.

We've now created RSS feeds of the NOLA.com forums. Folks, these forums are better than CNN. Oh, so much better than CNN.
Add them to your feed reader.

http://thinknola.com/wiki/index.php?title=NOLA.com_Forum_Feeds

The work of Jeff Rafter. Soon, we'll be turing these feeds directly into Wiki markup for classification.

The Wiki project took a day off, more or less, to enlist the support of some of the Ann Arbor's local Information Architecture experts. I'm now supported by Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeld, who are providing me with excellent insight, and resources. I'm going to try to enlist all the support of the good people of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

http://thinknola.com/wiki/

I'll keep you informed. Thank you.

[Alan Gutierrez]

Evelyn

I'm learning so much about the Wiki, social networking, and The City of New Orleans.

There is a lot of good news to be found. A lot of simple ways to help.

I'm blogging again, so I can call attention to our projects and progress. Hope you'll keep track, because I'll be drawing attention to the success stories in rebuilding.

There is so much for us to get together and discuss in a months time. All the efforts, what worked, what didn't. What we wish we had.

Well, stopping by to say hello, and thank you for linking early. It did help.