Full Circle Associates

While people are busy helping pour unstructured data from a variety of sources into the PeopleFinderVolunteer - Katrina Help Wiki, some folks are rightfully asking, how does this jive with or replicate with otherwork, such as the International Red Cross people database? Here is a reply from Jon Lebkowsky, one of the People Finder volunteers. I think this stuff is important to understand.

Red Cross is registering people we found, we're recording data that's unstructured from 1) inquiries from people searching for people who are "lost' and 2) reports of people who are okay. Red Cross might overlap 1 showing people who are okay, but they won't necessarily have specifics on who (relatives, friends etc.) might be looking for those people.
They may well not overlap 2 because those might be folks who never went to the Red Cross for help.

So what we're doing is different, and certainly more meaningful if we can match it with data collected by RC and refugee centers.

Here's another clarifying bit. ThinkNola is doing something complementary and different. From Ed Vielmetti, working on ThinkNola, it is

"going down to the neighborhood or even the block by block level reconnecting people
who have been dispersed. http://www.thinknola.com is not primarily a missing-persons-finder as much as it is a community-networks-builder.

These actually dovetail nicely. I also heard on the coordinating email list of ThinkNola that another site has asked to throw their stuff into the ThinkNola. This is the sort of thing I suspect will start happening - individual efforts start pooling. There is another step after this.

If you are good at seeing patterns and high level things, a great volunteer job right now might be to start thinking how these diverse volunteers efforts weave into some sort of networked response.

katrina, hurricanekatrina, thinknola, katrinapeoplefinder