Tuesday, September 6, 2005

Implement PFIF NOW

Evacuees Find No Easy Way Locate Family Members
by Joseph Shapiro
Morning Edition, September 6, 2005 · From the airport in New Orleans, tens of thousands of medical patients are airlifted to shelters in hospitals in often distant cities. That effort was coordinated by the U.S. military and government agencies. But there was almost no coordination to keep good lists of who was sent where.
The problem can only get worse. The Katrina PeopleFinder Project released the PFIF specification on Saturday to address just this issue of scattered refugees with no good lists of who went where. By Sunday, a massively parallel volunteer effort had hand-entered virtually every missing and found forum posting on the web (almost 80,000 records).

Our volunteers are tired. They worked all weekend and had to go back to their jobs. Companies should contribute an engineering team or two to the cause.

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