Social Source

The PeopleFinder project mobilized over 3,000 volunteers to accomplish these goals:

1. Enter unstructured data on refugees from forums across the web to the highest data quality standards possible with volunteers giving a little as one hour of their time.
2. Enter data from databases across the web into the central database via the PeopleFinder Interchange Format
3. Minimize duplicate records
4. Support other organizations in implementing the PeopleFinder Interchange Format
5. Make the central database avaliable to be searched
6. Use the Salesforce API to implement innovative technology solutions to the missing persons problem

What we accomplished:

The project started on September 1, 2005 with the Social Source Foundation, CivicSpace Labs and the Salesforce.com Foundation kicking off the community.
By September 5, we had finalized the Peoplefinder Interchange Format (PFIF), a technical standard for storing and exchanging refugee data.
By September 6, virtually every message board post was hand-entered by volunteers into the PeopleFinder database (100,000 records).
By September 10, almost every missing and found person record on the web was searchable at www.katrinalist.net (350,000 records).
By September 19, over 620,000 records are searchable.
In its first two weeks, the site processed over 500,000 searches
By October 2, the site had processed over one million searches and 649,015 records were searchable.

Even a month after the disaster, we received anecdotal stories of our impact:

> Dear David,
>
> I live in Burbank, ca, got home from work tonight (6pm PST)and had
> a phone messge from a friend here in LA. She lives on skid row but
> was born and raised in New Orleans.
>
> Her elderly mother and son and sister were in the katrina affected
> area, and she had tried to find them via phone calls and the
> internet, but could not. The desperation was thick in her voice
> message, she said she was very worried.
>
> I plugged in my WAN, and went to work. In 5 minutes, i kid you
> not, 5 DAMN MINUTES, i found her son, with a contact email and
> phone number. I set her up a hotmail email account, sent an email
> to him for her, then called her with the phone number. He is in
> Jacksonville NC.
>
> She said it was "only" midnight in Jacksonville and she is going to
> try and call !! I just hung up and her entire tone was happy and
> excited!
>
> I Wanted to send my deepest thanks to you and your crew (all 3000+)
> for giving me the tools to help my friend. You guys should run
> for office.
>
> Anyway, i cant thank you enough for all your hard work and
> sleepless nights. Acts of compassion and generosity like this give
> me hope for the human race. May God rest his rising star on all of
> you and bless you all the rest of your days on this earth.
>
> Peace,
> Sandy

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A gentleman, Dion Hinchcliffe, put together a very nice graphic of the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and an interesting take on a Discover Magazine article on our efforts.

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CiviCRM serves four very big communities, the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, advocacy, and political spaces. I love the advocacy & political guys because they are way ahead in their thinking. Aldon Hynes offered a great thought today:

Too many of the neo-techno-utopians fall into the same old thinking that technology is the panacea. Really, I suspect that in politics, as with so many of the social issues the world faces, the solution is getting more people to connect with one another, to share their thoughts, hopes, dreams and ideals. To the extent that technology helps get people to connect it can help address social issues. To the extent that it is even perceived as preventing real social connections, it is part of the problem.

In nonprofit technology, especially constitutent relationship management (fundrasing, case management, advocacy, etc.), technology needs to be evaluated to the extent it connects human beings to be more effective.

When we were thinking through our marketing pitch for the Social Source Foundation, we really struggled with efficiency vs. effectiveness. Human relationships lead to effectiveness. Efficiency is the realm of widgits and 4% reductions in operating expenses.

If the technology is really about the people, perhaps the language and message needs to reflect that.

CiviCRM serves three very big communities, the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, advocacy, and political spaces. I love the advocacy & political guys because they are way ahead in their thinking.

Too many of theneo-techno-utopians fall into the same old thinking that technology in their thinking.

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The development teams keep putting out pretty amazing stuff. Probably the best feature in CiviCRM is you can define custom fields and have registered web site users maintain their own information about themselves (CiviCRM Profiles). But it does soo much more...


We are pleased to announce the latest release of CiviCRM, version 1.2! CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, internationalized, constituent relationship management (CRM) application, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. As an open source solution, any company, organization or individual can download it, adapt it, modify it and use it without paying license fees.

CiviCRM is currently intended for qualified consultants who are considering deployment of a CRM solution for small to medium-sized non-profits. Organizations considering CiviCRM to meet specific needs should carefully evaluate CiviCRM.

Some Key Benefits of Deploying CiviCRM

• Unified view of every constituent. Store information about individuals, organizations and households and your interactions with them.
  
• Designed for Advocacy/NPO/NGOs. CiviCRM was designed for organizations that engage in advocacy, community and political organizing, and non-profit work.
  
• Seamless integration with web sites. CiviCRM integrates directly into popular open source CMS packages, including Drupal and Mambo. Registration and visitor interactions are logged directly into the system, including end-user maintenance of their own addresses and custom fields.
  
• Internationalized & Localized. CiviCRM was built from the ground up as a product intended to be used globally. It can store data in many localized formats and supports most languages globally.
  
• Open source & open standards. Licensed under the AGPL, users can make any modification to the software, can benefit from modifications made by others and can effectively interoperate with other applications.
  
• Affordable and cost effective. CiviCRM is available without a license fee and is supported by a community of nonprofit-focused consultants.

What’s new with 1.2?

• Improved Data Import/Export. Import and export virtually any CiviCRM data field or set with an easy-to-use interface.
  
• Improved “Profile” handling. We’ve optimized the display performance of our search. You can now search contacts quickly and efficiently. You can also now search on and display any CiviCRM field.
  
• Improved API. We’ve implemented additional API calls including search, group membership, custom fields and more. Remote access via SOAP is now supported.
  
• CiviMail. High volume mass emailing capabilities with the ability to track click-thrus and open rates. (Developer Release)

Demo, Downloads and Documentation

• Test drive CiviCRM 1.2 on our demo site
  
• Download CiviCRM here
  
• Installation instructions can be found here
  
• Documentation, including a Quick Start Guide and a detailed Administrator Guide can be found here
  

CiviCRM in a Nutshell

CiviCRM is a web-based CRM application that can be downloaded and installed either locally on a server, or in a hosted environment. It can be used as a powerful contact database application that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Keep track of conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

Technical Requirements:

Runs on any platform that supports:

• PHP 4.3+
  
• MySQL 4.0 or 4.1
  
• Drupal 4.6.3+ or Joomla 1.0.3+/Mambo4.5.3+
  
• Joomla/Mambo version of CiviCRM only supports PHP4 at this time

Key Features in Detail:

• Segmentation Tools. Use groups, simple and searchable tags, and/or relationships to segment constituents.
  
• Extensive Configurability. CiviCRM is highly configurable, allowing you, in most cases, to configure it to work with your existing business processes. Unlimited locations, addresses, phone numbers, emails and custom data fields allow most unique needs to be met.
  
• Internationalization & Localization. CiviCRM can store CRM data in many localized formats and supports most languages, currently including Brazilian Portuguese, German, Polish and Spanish.
  
• Contacts. Store common nonprofit contact data (individuals, organizations, and households) that support donor management, case management, voter, and advocacy applications.
  
• Relationships. Understand the relationships between any two contacts with standard (volunteer, employer, head of household) relationships or create your own unique custom relationship types.
  
• Activities. Record standard activities (phone call, meeting, email) for any contact or create your own custom activities that meet your needs. External software can use the CiviCRM Application Programming Interface (API) to register activities with any contact, providing a comprehensive central repository of CRM information.
  
• Smart Groups. Create smart groups based on any search criteria or create standard groups that are simply lists of contacts. The membership of a smart group changes automatically according to that moment’s search results.
  
• Custom Data. Create unlimited custom data fields in virtually any format, including radio buttons, drop-down menus, etc. All custom fields are searchable and can define a smart group.
  
• Support Multi-site Organizations and Networks. Centrally store data across multiple organizations or web sites.
  
• Import and Export Functionality with De-duping. Import functionality intelligently maps CiviCRM fields to imported data and checks for duplicates based on user-defined criteria.
  
• Robust Permissions. With Drupal integration, access to certain groups of contacts can be limited to specific users, offering a way for volunteers to manage small portions of a larger CiviCRM database.
  
• Website Integration. CiviCRM is integrated with both Drupal and Joomla/Mambo. Web site registrations automatically become CiviCRM records and individuals can maintain their own CRM record. Offerings like CivicSpace 0.8.2 integrate e-mail blasts, event, volunteer and petition functionality with CiviCRM.
  
• Application Programming Interface (API). A fully documented API exposing all major functionality of CiviCRM. For instance, you can search the database, register interactions with constituents, create or update contact information, etc. This allows CiviCRM to realistically be a central repository of virtually any nonprofit’s CRM information.
  

Future Releases

CiviCRM is in active development and is constantly improving. Some key features to look for are:

• CiviMail is available in 1.2 as a developer release. In future releases, we will update this high-capacity email broadcast tool with more user-friendly access.
  
• CiviCRM 1.3 will include CiviDonate, a donor management module and online donations solution.

About the Social Source Foundation

The Social Source Foundation is a 501-c-3 nonprofit creating internationalized, open source software of uncompromising quality for the nonprofit and nongovernmental sectors. Social Source Foundation is one of many partners in the creation of the CiviCRM platform, providing primary engineering support for the software.

How Do I Participate in the CiviCRM Project?

Interested parties are encouraged to participate in the development of CiviCRM. This can take the form of providing use cases, feedback on existing functionality, feature suggestions, code contributions, documentation contributions and beta testing. More info...

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I am a member of the bytesforall email list, a fairly academic discussion of ICT for developing countries. There was a recent debate about open source vs. Proprietary software that offered a couple interesting thoughts.

First, I've never seen a moderator like Frederick Noronha, who wrote a fantastic synthesis of the debate. Makes me happy to be on the list.

Second, he had nice things to say about me. :)

Most importantly, Richard Stallman has a quote I think we need to think seriously about in the nonprofit sector.

"The choice between free (freedom-respecting) and proprietary
(user-subjugating) software is not a technical choice. It is
an ethical and political issue about people's freedom. To be
neutral on issues that merely concern technology is fine. To
be neutral on ethical and political issues about freedom is
nothing to be proud of."

In the commercial world, software leads to efficiency, which leads to profits. Profits are kind of like software (IMHO)... they have no moral or ethical basis. It is neither moral or immoral to earn a profit.

In the nonprofit world, software leads to efficiency, which leads to organizations capable of doing more good. Doing good is in and of itself a moral and ethical issue.

When we look at open source in the nonprofit sector, I think it is important to at least acknowledge the values issue... why would I support proprietary software solutions that limit the number of nonprofits that can increase their efficiency and do good?

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Love Compumentor, their people and the whole basic idea behind NetSquared (http://www.netsquared.org). Netsquared is basically a Web 2.0 nonprofit technology community process that leads up to a conference/ gala event that will happen 196 days from now.

I would like to pose a challenge: conferences and "Gala events" are to often about thinking rather than doing. I challenge the folks in this community to spend the next 196 days doing. And spend the conference and gala celebrating what has been done.

I wrote a paper a bit ago talking about Web 2.0 Collaboration for Nonprofits. The basic thesis is that Web 2.0 Collaboration is about "Moving to a culture where the first question is “how can others leverage what I’m doing” rather than “how can I protect myself from other leveraging what I am doing.”

At the Social Source Foundation, we built the CiviCRM software to provide nonprofit-specific constitutent relationship management functionality. We answered the question "how can others leverage what we're doing", by integrating it with Drupal/CivicSpace, the software that runs the NetSquared website. We also published an open API that allows people to develop new software using the core CRM functionality of CiviCRM.

We would like to spend the next 196 days working with folks to deliver some "doing." What might be good doing? We might work with volunteer match to use APIs to integrate their wonderful volunteer recruitment system with CiviCRM, allowing a nonprofit to "automagically" store CRM information about VolunteerMatch volunteers.

We're already working with LINC (Low Income Networking and Communications Project of the Welfare Law Center) to build a robust, free and open source CRM solution specifically designed for grassroots organizing groups.

We'd like to work with you on radically improving constitutent relationship mangement in the nonprofit sector. We've taken the first step by publishing our documentation, specifications, APIs and code under an open source license. Now we'd like to actively help others leverage what we're doing. Visit http://www.openngo.org/ for more information and drop me a line if you'd like to join us in celebrating Web 2.0 achievements in 196 days.

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For a loose coalition of 3,000 volunteers, we seem to be doing pretty well.

As of October 2, 2005, the www.katrinalist.net database has 649,015 missing and found persons records. Over 1 million searches have been performed since it went live on 9/6/05, including 16,702 searches since Monday, 9/26/05.

We have a number of anecdotal stories of matches through the katrinalist.net website and are currently working to make sure the PeopleFinder approach and infrastructure are avaliable for the next disaster.

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After the immediate aftermath of the hurricanes, there is still a need for clearer information flows to and from shelters.

http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/ShelterFinder

Longer-term evacuee shelters will need longer-term help and support, but its still not easy to get a clear overview of

• where shelters are
• current shelter status
• how to contact shelters
• how local volunteers are already helping
• how new volunteers can also help

We need your help. Please send me an email at dgeilhufe@socialsourcefoundation.org and I will connect you with the right folks.

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So hurricane Rita basically went right over my house.

We got back to see out place last week and there was no significant damage, so that was a relief. Our neighbor, though, had a huge tree fall in their living room.

Once they get the electricity back on in Beaumont, we'll head back and start the clean up and repairs.

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A personal history of the Katrina PeopleFinder Project PART I

The term “social source” is something I have used for half a decade to describe collision of nonprofit technology and the open source movement. It tries to capture the idea that technology can be harnessed for a social mission by employing community development, online community, and web 2.0 strategies.

The PeopleFinder project started for me with a fairly simple social mission. Some folks wanted to put up a website that included CiviCRM, the open source nonprofit constituent relationship management system being developed by a bunch of us at the Social Source Foundation.

Being a good cause and a good test of our technology, we agreed to help install CiviCRM in www.neworleansnetwork.org. Its use would be to power a “peoplefinder” feature, like so many others on the web, to help connect evacuees with one another.

And then I thought about it for a second.
(1) Why build yet another small scale solution to a large-scale problem.
(2) We built CiviCRM to solve major, large-scale nonprofit effectiveness issues related to constituent relationship management.
(3) Open and distributed systems can scale to provide real solutions to national problems.

As this stuff was formulating in my head, I drew up the initial fields for the peoplefinder thinking that we could aggregate all the evacuee sites on the web. Never once did I think there could be a single, “master” database of evacuees. Instead I thought about ways all the evacuee sites could “talk” to one another.

So we needed a data standard with the right fields so that all these bulletin boards and online databases could interoperate. I’m not sure at what point I decided this was going to be a national solution to the problem rather than a small community based web site, but on September 1st, I observed in an email, “Seems like we could bang something usable out in a couple days, get volunteers to do data entry from discussion boards, etc. and have a pretty useful refugee matching solution.”

So then I went out to people I knew and started enlisting help. Andy Carvin, Marty Kearns and Deborah Elizabeth Finn got the first email. Kieran Lal and Zack Rosen from CivicSpace Labs were already involved and they brought in Steve Wright from the Salesforce Foundation.

And this kind of became the ethos of the PeopleFinder project. Send an email out about what needs to get done. People respond to that email and take charge of getting things done. Magically, a solution appears and you’re not quite sure what exactly happened, but you’re trilled that there is now a solution. And you move on to the next thing.

By the 2nd we had a comprehensive list of missing persons sites tagged in http://del.icio.us/tag/peoplefinder. If we wanted to aggregate the bulletin boards and databases, we would need a dynamic, living and scalable list. Del.icio.us did the trick. Note the first use of an open technology…didn’t have to buy it, could just use it to do good. This is an important theme, the technology has to be pre-positioned, accessible, and you can’t need to “ask permission” or even involve the folks that “own”/maintain the technology to use it for your purposes.

About this time, Salesforce.com Foundation committed to providing the back end database and search engine. My motives in engaging Salesforce were twofold. First, they are good guys, committed to open standards…if only they were open source ☺ Second, I felt it important to get a big corporate player involved in the hopes that they could move resources latter on in the process, though their technology is pretty cool too. (Gotta remember, I’m part of the team building the open source nonprofit CRM—I think the nonprofit sector needs a Salesforce.com class solution that meets their needs and is open source :).

The Salesforce.com Foundation and the folks in the company have good hearts, do good work, and we were blessed to have them on the team.

Also on the 2nd we put up a mailing list, katrinadev, because it’s the Internet and you can’t do a project without a mailing list, and recruited folks and did countless other tasks.

On the 2nd we also made a critical technology decision… use a distributed technology like RSS to solve the problem of 20 different evacuee databases. Rather than force everyone to go to a central database, lets make EVERY database central by syndicating evacuee data. At this point the Godfather of the PeopleFinder Interchange Format (PFIF), Ka-Ping Yee, rode in on his white horse. I’m pretty sure Zack Rosen roped him into this, but I don’t actually know for sure how Ping got involved.

Actually, I thought the spec took 24 hours longer to write than it should have, but I have no technology skills, and, as it turned out, should have just trusted Ping and Jon Plax to do a good job… cause they did a stellar one.

I’m not even sure what we actually did the 2nd… Andy Carvin was great at helping flesh out the idea and introducing us to bloggers and others that could spread the call for volunteers. Other folks “spread the meme” and people kept popping out of the woodwork to do stuff.

I think it was the 2nd that Ethan Zuckerman and Jon Lebkowsky were introduced to PeopleFinder—they become critical to the story latter on.

On the 3rd, the Salesforce.com team outlined a project plan and lined up internal resources. Kellan Elliott-McCrea connected us to some guys from Craigslist who were facing the problem of being a repository of missing persons anLinkd saw the benefits of a central database (they eventually coded part of the system we used to parse Craigslist into bite sized chunks for data entry volunteers).

We needed a website, a place for a community to self organize. I’ve been a member of the Omidyar Network (http://www.omidyar.net/home/) it started, and have always thought they could be much more than they are. They exist so that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen. Seemed like a good fit at the time.

On the 3rd Jon Lebkowsky came into the mix from Omidyar (I think). I’ve chatted with Jon a couple times, knew he was a good guy, and basically got out of his way. At some point Jon and Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman center at Harvard became the point people on data entry. I literally have no idea how the code got written to enable volunteers to do data entry, how the training materials for volunteers got developed, or how that whole side of things happened. I just know there are lots of amazing people that came together and made it work.

Took us about 3 hours to outgrow Omidyar’s interface and move over to http://katrinahelp.info/, a wikipedia site much better suited to the type of self organizing we were doing. Looking back at my email, I think it was Jon Lebkowsky that introduced me to Rudi Cilibrasi, the guy “in charge” of katrinahelp. I just remember trying to connect with Rudi on Skype and having the technology just not work. I ended up calling him (he lives in Europe) and having a 15 minute conversation that just lead us to trust one another… our goals and values were in alignment.

Again Rudi was providing open technology—a wikipedia site. We didn’t need his “permission” to start using the technology (though of course we got it first because that was polite). Even though we didn’t technically need his help to use the technology, he was an amazing resource because he understood deeply how his technology worked and could help others in the community use it to solve problems.

The relationship between PeopleFinder coordinating organizations (Social Source Foundation, CivicSpace Labs, and the Salesforce.com Foundation) and katrinahelp.info is part of what I call Web 2.0 Collaboration. People, technology and organizations whose default position is trust…whose first question is “how can others leverage what I’m doing” rather than “how can I protect myself from other leveraging what I am doing.”
http://socialsource.blogspot.com/2005/08/social-source-web-20-collaboration.html

This whole experience underscores the absurdity of building insular communities that “discover their own power to make good things happen.” Communities exist all over the world and in cyberspace and just need a little infrastructure to catapult them into highly effective entities. That infrastructure of communication and simple directories of what is available needs to be distributed rather than centralized.

Around 3pm on the 3rd we started data entry and started distributing a plea:
http://socialsource.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-gave-money-already-give-your.html

At 11:30 pm on the 3rd, I figured it might be good to actually write down an overview of what we had been doing for the past couple days.
http://socialsource.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-peoplefinder-project.html

By the 4th, it was pretty clear that we had expanded past the point of being coordinated. So we tried to get some folks to “officially” lead sections of the effort. That effort fell flat on its face mostly because their were people already leading the effort… they were was to busy doing things to have time to list themselves as a leader.

Around this time my role became “human router” I would look at the email stream which was getting absurdly large, and simply connect people with one another. Hey person A, talk to Person B before you do thing C.

The fourth was about details… getting the HTML data entry form from good enough to good, getting the PFIF documentation to a place that it was really useful for developers. Lots and lots of details…

By 3AM on the 5th, we had 10,000 records entered into the database and the volunteer effort was snowballing.

More to come..

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Three distinct disaster response situations come up recently underscoring the need for a solid open source NPO/NGO CRM platform.

1. The Katrina PeopleFinder Project created a single unified database of virtually every missing and found person record on the web (640,000+ records).
2. The ShelterFinder Project created a comprehensive listing of Katrina evacuee shelters (from large Red Cross shelters to small 10 bed churches).
3. The Fluwiki is building an infrastructure to deal with the potential bird flu pandemic.

Each of these projects needs to quickly and efficiently build an application based on individuals and organizations (missing persons, shelters, flue victims). Each started with CiviCRM, but moved on to another solution because CiviCRM isn't quite ready.

The PeopleFinder experience allowed us to optimize CiviCRM, achieving a 100x efficiency improvement. What we need is your support to continue the development of CiviCRM and, most importantly, support its broad adoption in the nonprofit and non governmental sectors.

Open Source means that no one has to ask permission or buy a license to mount a disaster response. We don't have to wait for a philanthropically minded corporation like Yahoo to send 40 engineers to Houston. The nonprofit/ NGO sector can put together a response that leverages volunteer skills into a complete solution within a matter of days (as demonstrated by the PeopleFinder project).

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I live in Beaumont, TX, and the day after I arrived in Beaumont a few years back, I stayed in town through a "mandatory" evacuation. Didn't do it this time with Hurricane Rita.

Right now, Michelle and I are fine in Dallas in a hotel. The news coverage seems like the house might be fine as well, which would be quite a relief.

Thanks for all the inquiries after our health and well being.

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In early September, I sent out an urgent call for resources for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project. I wanted to follow up, share our achievements, and thank you for your support.

We have combined virtually every missing and found person listing on the web (currently over 640,000 records) into a single searchable database at http://www.katrinalist.net/ in less than a week with an all-volunteer effort.


Goals & Achievements

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project set out to solve a single problem: an evacuee needed to search up to 40 different websites to find out where their loved ones were located and whether they were OK. We laid out three goals:

1. Create a technology specification for easily exchanging evacuee information.
2. Assemble and coordinate volunteers building technology to get all evacuee data into a central database provided by Salesforce.com Foundation.
3. Organizing a massively parallel volunteer data entry project to enter refugee data posted to online bullitin boards into a central database by hand.

We mobilized over 3,000 volunteers and accomplished these goals.

• The project started on September 1, 2005 with the Social Source Foundation, CivicSpace Labs and the Salesforce.com Foundation committing ourselves to the three basic goals.
• By September 5, we had finalized the Peoplefinder Interchange Format (PFIF), a technical standard for storing and exchanging refugee data.
• By September 6, virtually every message board post was hand-entered by volunteers into the PeopleFinder database (~100,000 records).
• By September 10, almost every missing and found person record on the web was searchable at www.katrinalist.net (~350,000 records).
• By September 19, over 620,000 records are searchable.
• Our data is being processed by IBM and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to form part of a central database of evacuees for the Red Cross and Microsoft.

On-going efforts

Two major sister projects have been spawned from the volunteer community:

ShelterFinder is creating a dynamic, comprehensive national listing of shelters (including small community based churches, etc).

PeopleFinder volunteers are coming together to make sure that the technology, procedures and relationships between institutions necessary to duplicate our achievements are ready for the next major disaster.


Learn More

For me, this entire experience is about non-profits having the capacity to leverage technology and massively parallel resources to better fulfill their missions... helping people. The same work I do at the Social Source Foundation.

It is time that we invest in pre-positioning technology, capacity, plans and knowledge so that we’re not building the bridge as we cross the river in the next disaster. I was proud to have led part of this dynamic, distributed effort. If you would like more information, please send me an email and I will connect you to the appropriate person(s).

We are at also offering an overview of the project in a Webinar sponsored by the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN), HumaniNet, Aspiration, and the Innovation Funders Network. Hurricane Katrina: Innovative Information and Communication Responses is a free online event. You can register at http://www.nten.org/webinars.


Thanks from the many volunteers of the Katrina PeopleFinder Project,
http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project


And a personal thank you from me,

David Geilhufe
Co-Founder
Social Source Foundation
Connect with me on Linkedin...

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I think we now have most of the Katrina missing and found persons on the web in the database. You can search at http://www.katrinalist.net/

Now the Red Cross needs to get itself together and get a common database together. We keep hearing it will be Katrinasafe.com .... get on with it. There are survivors that need to know where their friends and family are.

We of course, built the PeopleFinder Interchange Format to avoid the need to have a common database, but unless it's widely adopted, it will not solve the problem.

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The PeopleFinder effort has been incredible fast, distributed, disconnected and effective all at the same time.

If you've been involved, I engcourage you to write a personal story of your involvement. I'm writing mine now.

Eventually, we might actually figure out how a bunch of unpaid volunteers created the most comprehensive directory of survivors and missing persons on the web (and A LOT more including ShelterFinder) .

Keiran's story.

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Paste this code into your HTML page to provide a search into the Katrina PeopleFinder Project data.

Katrina PeopleFinder Project

Enter a name, phone number, email address, city, zip or neighborhood of the person you are looking for. Powered by the community of volunteers from the Katrina People Finder Project.

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This is our effort in numbers. On the 4th the technology went up. By the 6th, the majority of unstructured data was in the database (craigslist, nola.com, etc.) through thousands of volunteer data entry folks and "scrapes" of Gluf Coast News, IDRC, MSNBC and other structured sources were ready to go into the database, but not there yet.

Unfortunately, it took another couple of days working through technology issues for stuctured data to be bulk loaded into the PeopleFinder database and today we have the comprehensive database we wanted to have up by the 7th.

People ask me where survivors should search. I tell them (1) Yahoo People Finder (good name, I approve) because it constantly is crawling the various boards and resources. (2) Katrina Safe becuase it is destined to be the "official" repository. (3) Katrinalist.net since we have some records that Yahoo doesn't and our data is in a more structured format, allowing potentially better matches with partial information.

We are doing this becuase survivors need to find their loved ones now. Eventually, the technology instrastructure will exist, hopefully based on what we've done here, to make quick massive reaction a plan rather than a struggle that requires Yahoo to fend 40 engineers out to Houston and Microsoft to have engineering teams working around the clock in Houston, or thousands of Katrina PeopleFinder Project volunteers work straight through the holiday weekend.

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Includes scrapes of Gulf Coast News and IRDC familylinks data. As always our data contains a hyperlink back to the original source so survivors can evaluate the original source of information.

All data is in the PeopleFinder Data Interchange Format and can be syndicated via RSS between organizations (like shelters) and websites.

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Katrinalist.net, the search engine into the Katrina PeopleFinder Project data, has over 200,000 evacuee records in it as of this morning as uploading data from other existing databases has begun. We know there are duplicates in there, but figure folks would rather find 6 records about their brother than no records at all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project has another 300,000 records qued up to enter the database.

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Today was a bit of a roller coaster. PFIF uploads are functional on the server. We parsed our first inbound PFIF feed. Volunteer data entry started up again. We had a little community "crisis of conciousness" as it became aparent that katrinasafe.org would become a defacto standard.

And the community came together again, thought about it for a sec, figured we still had a niche, then redoubled its efforts. Very cool. Check out the Shelter Project, a massively parallel effort to identify shelters and gather PFIF compliant data for the search engine. Current community thinking seems to be that we may be more effective at nationally aggregating shelter data quickly, especially from small community based agencies.

Status of sites implementing PFIF feeds is here.Link

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