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PlaNetwork Austin: Katrina Response

Last night I spoke at a PlaNetwork event at City Hall in Austin, which was about the response to Katrina. First speaker was Austin's CIO, Pete Collins, talking about Austin's IT Incident Preparedness Group. Pete said they essentially had to build a cityw ithin a city within 20 hours when they set up the local evacuee center. Some of the lessons learned:

They needed a boundariless prequalified IT pool representing key skill sets.
In an emergency response situation, it's important to get to operational mode as quickly as possible.
There's more pure labor than you would expect in moving and setting up PCs.
Focus on communication - very helpful to have phones so that people can let others know where they are, that they're okay.
We need to be better prepared overall or "we might not be able to do this again, especially in a situation that's far worse.

There was a sense that the Red Cross was ill-prepared for Katrina; someone who'd been involved in the response noted that RC focused more readily and effectively on raising funds than on actual relief efforts.

Gary Chapman showed the Austin Helping New Orleans web site he'd set up with help from volunteers. The site, based on pMachine's Expression Engine. His focus was on aggregating information for people who were confused about what was going on and how they could help. Gary said there had also been work on an online volunteer database for Austin, not finished in time for the Katrina effort, but it'll be there in the future.

I talked about my work with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and its sister project, ShelterFinder. Check out this pdf from my presentation. I've blogged about PeopleFinder here, at Smart Mobs, and at WorldChanging.

jon posted this at 8:04 AM
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