Saturday, September 3, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: Volunteer Data Entry

Information on missing persons is in hundreds of forums accross the web.

If a thousand people spend just one hour today entering information from forums into a database, hurricane victims will have a much easier time finding out the status of friends and loved ones.

We have a repository for this data at http://www.neworleansnetwork.org/ a grassroots website built with grassroots technology (CiviSpace & CiviCRM) by grassroots folks Radical Designs and League of Pissed Off Voters.

Step One:
Figure out how were going to coordinate a massively parallel volunteer data entry effort.
Sites that need to be entered by hand (we can't write software that will put their information in our database) are tagged in delicious.
http://del.icio.us/tag/peoplefinder+unstructured

Step Two:
Write clear instructions on how to participate.

Step Three:
Let as many people know about it as possible.

We are on step one. Send me an email at dgeilhufe at-- sourcialsourcefoundation dot-- org to help with the planning.

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