Welcome to the home of
TWiki.Katrina. This is a web-based collaboration area for the School of Information to coordinate a response to Katrina. SI North 2nd floor conference room is the physical "war room" for the effort; we have an email list at si.katrina AT umich.edu that you may join through
http://directory.umich.edu.
If you need to register for the wiki, try
http://www.socialcomputingresearch.net/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration.
September 22, 2005 meeting
Session ideas -- for future class meetings
- Plans -- following vs. adaptation
- Centralized vs. decentralized orgs
- Coordinated / duplicated efforts -- church groups, technical orgs
- Grassroots niches in relief efforts
- Building on existing social systems or groups
- Disaster / mitigation / lessons learned / implementation cycle
- Who is using / not using digital response systems?
- Which aspects of design matter in a crisis
- "Digital divide" -- temporary vs. ongoing lack of access
- Provision of information
- Needs discovery issues
- Vetting / credentializing
- Outreach / communication
Monday: Content is King
Our content editors have done great work Sunday and Monday.
We were slashdotted in passing this morning, at the tail end of another post, but so far the server load is tolerable.
We now have feeds from
MoveOn? and katrinahousing.org and the
MetaSearch? is almost up. We will probably be getting the developers of the Google Maps stuff at katrinashelter.com to integrate their code with our aggregate database. And in the next couple days katrinashelter.com is going to shut down and redirect their traffic to our site.
Saturday: Our site has moved over to Drupal
This allows site editing/maintenance without knowing HTML!
Friday: Our site is now live!
http://katrinahousing.net
Thanks to Adrienne Janney and Libby Hemphill for burning the midnight oil.
Our Overall Plans
We have become aware of major concerns with the un-intermediated matching process model of sites like Craigs List. People may not know what they"re getting into, and poor matches may be made. Red Cross and social service agencies may be better positioned to do the final matching, after investigating. We haven"t taken a position on this yet-- we"re creating a
form for private data collection on behalf of the Red Cross (data not posted on the web), and also creating a
meta-search service for the public listings generated on other sites.
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