ThinkNOLA.com - wiki to coordinate Hurricane Katrina rescue, relief and refugee support
I've spent too much time listening to news, reading the wire services, and otherwise immersed in passive media consumption about Katrina. It's too easy to be obsessed about things you can't control.
After a very good hour talking to Alan Guiterrez here's what I'm going to focus my Katrina energies on for a while.
His site ThinkNOLA.com is designed to be a detailed, area by area, organization by organization, even block by block collection of information about what is going on and how people who have been affected can recover. It served as a key resource in the evacuation of Xavier University to collect fragmentary bits of information from around the net and put them in one place.
The observation that's key in making this work is that there are sites like nola.com with extremely active bulletin board style postings that are utterly failing to act as an ongoing information resource because postings so quickly scroll off the end. So the simplest possible thing that works to improve on that is to cut something from nola and paste it into the right place on ThinkNOLA to give it some context and coordination. (And to cut and paste out of other online forums, mailing lists, etc etc.) Think clearinghouse, not bulletin board.
The first page that I'm focusing on - and to make some comprehension of a huge problem you have to focus somewhere - is on Methodist Hospital. There you will find a few clippings from nola.com and whatever news I can snag from the wires. Please, it's a wiki, chip in.
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