Full Circle Associates

Hm, yet another good idea to capture then move forward...

BuzzMachine � Blog Archive � Recovery 2.0: A call to convene:

"Rob Says:
September 6th, 2005 at 12:04 pm

I worked in one of the shelters and I was amazed to see the technology they were using to register evacuees: very simple Excell spreadsheets.

Someone needs to develop an open-source “Evacuation Shelter Operating System”. A single CD or DVD that installs on either a single computer or a network of computers that helps even untrained people get a shelter running and keeps records of evacuees and their progress.

If network connectivity is available, then the software can make use of it, but it must not assume connectivity. It should be able to offer guidelines for setting up a shelter, be able to print name badges for victims and volunteers, be able to print signs for the shelter, have contact information for all government agencies (which can be printed out for volunteers), have logistics and planning functions to estimate food and water needs, have forms for evacuees to fill out with contact and family information (to be made available over the internet, once connectivity is established), and so on.

Often, shelters are set up by volunteers with only sketchy training or even none at all. When you see real pros set up a shelter, you realize that there is much science to it and that doing it right leads to a much better experience for the evacuees.

I don’t think this would be an enourmous effort. It’s really just a web application deployed on the main computer, with other computers interacting with it via web browsers. Gathering and indexing the enormous amount of information it would need to present could take some time, but I’ll bet a lot of that work has already been done.

Imagine the coolness of a Shelter OS that could, with little or no work by the staff, find other Shelter OS’s running elsewhere, trade information with them and start to link up scattered families or automatically bring along medical information and history as an evacuee is moved from shelter to shelter.

We could do this."

recovery2, katrina, hurricanekatrina, community_building