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FROM THE DECEMBER 2005 ISSUE

Ordinary people can solve communication problems much quicker than cluelessgovernment officials when catastrophes like hurricane Katrina strike

By Steve Berlin Johnson | Thursday, December 01, 2005

RELATED TAGS: COMPUTERS, NATURAL DISASTERS

Ordinary people can solve communication problems much quicker than clueless government officials

when catastrophes like hurricane Katrina strike

A lot of the havoc wreaked by natural disasters is sheer physics. The explosive energy unleashed when a

wind blowing 150 miles per hour collides with a large pane of glass or a 30-foot wave washes over housesis terrifying. But natural disasters also involve crises of information that can turn out to be as deadly as

the physics. The residents of India and Sri Lanka had almost two hours to move to higher ground after

seismographs first registered the quake that triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, but because

those regions lacked a warning system, tens of thousands perished. Recovery, too, is hobbled by damaged

information systems. Think of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's hapless Michael Brown and

how he discovered thousands of people were trapped in the New Orleans convention center: "I learned

about it from the news reports," he said.

Ordinary citizens can't do much about a 150-mph wind or a 30-foot wave, other than get out of the way.

But the Internet revolution teaches us that ordinary citizens can play a crucial role in creating nimble new

channels of information that are more resilient than official channels. In the wake of hurricane Katrina, a

grassroots movement has emerged that blogger and author Doc Searls calls "the war on error." What's

striking about this movement is how much it differs from the traditional civilian response to natural

disasters. Instead of sending clothes or food or dollars, next-generation volunteers supply data.

The most telling illustration of how disasters obstruct communication is the way we search for people

afterward. Normally, when we're looking for someone, we pick up the phone, send an e-mail, or simply

knock on a door. But in the middle of a catastrophe, a different convention emerges that seems hopelessly

archaic in the age of Google. Think about 9/11: walls covered with hundreds of photographs bearing thesame plaintive question, "Have you seen this person?"

When Katrina struck New Orleans on Monday, August 29, similar notices began to appear onlineon

craigslist, on Yahoo, on the Red Cross Web site. But that information was too scattered to be useful. The

queries were everywhereon dozens of sites. So it was almost impossible to report that someone had been

located and be guaranteed that the information would reach the people who needed it. On Saturday,

September 3, as the catastrophe worsened, a handful of tech-savvy volunteers led by David Geilhufe

started gathering data from these sites by "screen scraping," an automated process that involves grabbing

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the relevant information for each personname, location, age, and descriptionand depositing it in a

single database. Geilhufe and his team concocted a standardized method of organizing the data, which

they called PeopleFinder Interchange Format.

Still, there were thousands of missing-person notices online the next day that hadn't been converted into

the PeopleFinder format because they were not machine readable. Typically these messages were quite

simple: for example, "I'm looking for my uncle John who lived in the Ninth WardSarah Bowen." That

requires a human to parse the syntax. So that morning two well-regarded online figuresJon Lebkowsky

and Ethan Zuckermandecided to team up to coordinate a volunteer effort, with Lebkowsky recruiting

people to scan through all the online posts and Zuckerman dealing out chunks of data to be analyzed.

By the next morning, PeopleFinder had attracted the attention of a few widely read bloggers. They spread

the word to their readers about the need for volunteers. By the end of the day, thousands were

volunteering. The group was briefly hamstrung by the database's being overloaded with activity. But by

Tuesday night 50,000 entries had been processed, and the number continued to rise dramatically in the

days that followed. Meanwhile, people looking for relatives or friends could visit www. katrinalist.net,

where the PeopleFinder team provided a search tool that made it possible to enter a name, a zip code, oran address and get a list of names matching the query within seconds.

PeopleFinder was the kind of data-management effort that could have taken a year to execute at great

expense if a corporation or a government agency had been in charge of it. The PeopleFinder group

managed to pull it off in four days for zero dollars.

"The goal was not to overengineer our tools for the data-entry effort," Zuckerman says, "but to build

something very quickly that would let people lend a hand. The solution we came up with was adequate to

let 3,000 people participate. And 3,000 people, lightly coordinated, can do impressive things."

Zuckerman is reluctant to compare the speed of PeopleFinder with the slow government response to

Katrina. "We weren't pulling people from toxic waters," he says. But he does think that the decentralized

nature of PeopleFinder has advantages: "One of the reasons PeopleFinder was deployed so quickly is that

we had no one to answer to. When no one is approving your work, it's an invitation to solve problems in

whatever way you want. I suspect there are many folks involved with the government response who

wished they'd had that much flexibility and freedom."

There were other decentralized responses to Katrina. Barely 48 hours after the hurricane hit, two Web

designers in Utah launched a site called www. katrinahousing.org to connect evacuees with people all

across the country who had a spare bedroom or a guest cottage or even a foldout couch. Two weeks later,5,000 people had found temporary homes through the site.

Of course, it's impossible to benefit from services like Katrinahousing and Katrinalist if you don't have

Internet access. Most of the region affected by Katrina couldn't make a landline phone call after the storm

hit, much less log on to the Web. But groups set out to remedy that problem by creating improvised

wireless networks in damaged areas, distributing computers and "voice over IP" phones to storm victims

and first responders, and establishing low-power FM radio stations in places like the Astrodome.

According to the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network home page, the groups involved in


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When hurricane Katrina hit the

Gulf Coast, the all-volunteer

PeopleFinder team consolidated

data from more than 25 Web

sties and message boards and

created a displaced-persons

directory that quickly grew to

include 650,000 searchablerecords. Users have conducted

roughly 1 million searches since

the site went live.

the project shipped 2,600 pounds of equipment to the region within days.

The people at the forefront of these efforts had no professional disaster experience. All they had was

technical expertise and access to a vast network of people willing to volunteer time, provide shelter, or

donate equipment.

Grassroots efforts can replace certain government tasks when disaster strikes.

We still need authorities to pull people out of toxic

waters, repair levees, and keep order.

But when it comes to good information, I suspect

these grassroots networkers will be as important, if

not more so. In the war on error, they are the true first

responders.

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