Relief efforts and mass collaboration

Hurricane Katrina caused more human misery and economic damage than any storm on record in the USA. Government agencies initially found themselves struggling with the immediate aftermath and the need to provide relief services to the victims of the storm.

One ray of hope in the midst of the hopelessness was the emerging maturity of interative web technologies and the tools of online mass collaboration.

David Geilhufe and a handful of volunteers began developing software to compile XML format data of identified victims. This screen scraping software automatically scanned a wide variety of disparate web sites, forums, bulletin boards and so on. However, human assistance was needed to compile the data as well and after a high profile call to action, largely through the blogoshpere, some three thousand collaborators had compiled 50,000 entries within 3 days (this eventually rose to 650,000). Salesforce.com donated much needed infrastructure for the hosting and database requirements.

The project serves as an example of the roll that the Internet and the tools of mass collaboration need to play in a modern day emergency response / relief effort situation.