06 September 2005

Geekdom comes in various forms - in my case both fandom and the computer world.

Over in fandom there’s a targeted effort by fans to provide housing and assistance to the fans affected by Katrina, including having noted authors Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon offering up their home and time to host people and to coordinate others willing to host people or donate food, time or money. My wife’s blog has more details and links - so if you are a fan here’s a great way to help!

And in the computer world there’s the Katrina Data Project, which I blogged about a couple days ago. Computer geeks of the world have similarly generously volunteered their time and resources to make this work as well. Here’s part of an email from the project, along with contact info if you want to get involved as well:

Some quick data on what we've accomplish so far: We're housing data on over 65,000 searching or safe individuals... the only larger datastore I am aware of is the ICRC Red Cross site. We've received data that even the Red Cross hasn't aggregated yet... files put together by volunteers on the ground in shelters  We're listed on the homepage of "Emergency web terminals" being deployed in the disaster area. I just met today with the Salvation Army IT team... we will be bringing in over 50,000 more records from their data sources. We will be helping them capture additional data going forward... their system is currently transporting and storing data via email. We are organizing a network of volunteers who will be traveling to their local shelters and help us receive data We've got 500 volunteers in a callcenter waiting for access to our data so they can begin an outbound calling effort. Much much more than I can type right now. John Galloway The Katrina Data Project Public Search and Registry: http://www.searchkatrina.com 
Data Interchange Site: http://www.katrinadataproject.com

e: john@katrinadataproject.com AIM: KDataProject