Thanks to all who have helped with PeopleFinder

[sarahlee]

Many good DUers have helped with the vast project of aggregating data about Lost/found Katrina victims from many, many sources.

Thought you might want to see this press release - and feel free to share it with your local papers.

====
VOLUNTEERS SURF and SCRUB THE WEB TO HELP RECONNECT FAMILY AND FRIENDS

FOR MEDIA ONLY
Contact: Sue Cline: Volunteer : Katrinalist.net : Communications & Media Phone: [phone]
Contact: Marty Kearns: Volunteer : Katrinalist.net : Communications & Media (C ) 202-487-1887
Contact: Zack Rosen: Volunteer : Katrinalist.net : Technical and Engineering Lead (C) [phone]


WASHINGTON, Friday, September 09, 2005 — The largest collection of data on the web about evacuees and survivors has been pulled together by volunteers and programmers working long hours for the last week. The http://www.katrinalist.net is a collection of survivor information from across dozens of sites. The project was launched to provide information on survivors to family and friends across the web. The http://www.katrinalist.net site forms a needed complement to a pending launch of newer efforts to organize data by the Red Cross, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security.

The "official sites" will be focusing on new more structured data collected from people in shelters and from those interacting with government programs and relief organizations. http://www.Katrinalist.net is the complement to whatever official collection all the informal data from bulletin boards, discussion forms and sites across the web. Katrinalist.net will provide data to Katrinasafe.com

Those seeking information on family should first search www.katrinasafe.com and then www.katrinalist.net. These sites represent the best collection of data and the best hope for helping family and friends locate each other.

Evacuees wishing to inform loved ones of their location can register or post information about survivors at http://www.katrinasafe.com/WebEntryApplication/entryform.aspx

Report a Missing Person at
http://www.katrinasafe.com/WebEntryApplication/InquiryEntryForm.aspx

These are all voluntary and self-reporting tools. All media outlets and those hosting discussion boards, search tools and other information on survivors or offering connections to families are asked to redirect search traffic and data input to these sites.

Additional Background:
The project was launched as the core team started to realize that too many sites were collecting data and stories on families looking for or posting the status of their friends and neighbors. In the moments leading up to the storm dozens of sites launched services to help their members, including: New Orleans Newspapers (NOLA.com), TV and radio sites, Craigslist, CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, Blogs and the Red Cross. In the hours following the storm companies, college students and volunteers began to set up databases for people to add and search information.

On Friday the 9th, The American Red Cross, with support of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement launched a web site and hotline to help assist family members who are seeking news about loved ones living in the path of Hurricane Katrina.

Dozens of message boards have sprung up around the country since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, promising to throw a technological lifeline to families that have been ripped apart. At the same time, the proliferation of registries has also made it increasingly difficult to figure out where to find information on missing loved ones.

"If I'm a refugee trying to find my brother, I would have to search 20 databases and 25 online forums," said David Geilhufe, chief executive of the Social Source Foundation, a charity set up to create software for other non-profits. "It's a huge problem."

Enter Katrinalist.net. The all volunteer team created a searchable directory of persons displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina, consolidating over 25 different online resources into one central, searchable repository. PeopleFinder Interchange Format, (called 'PFIF') is a new, standardized data format implemented in XML.

Katrina People Finder (www.katrinalist.net) helps in the organization of data about people affected by major storms such as Hurricane Katrina and speeds searches by allowing many organizations to contribute to a central repository.The interchange format of Katrina People Finder makes automated search and retrieval of data about people quick and easy. Common data will help automated systems to connect displaced individuals via automatic categorization and matching.

The Kartinalist.net PeopleFinder database now contains just barebones information -- such as name, phone number, last known address and status. But Dean Robison of Salesforce.com, a San Francisco software firm that is providing the technology to run the consolidated database, said it could easily be expanded in the future to speed rescue and relief operations in further disasters.

The Power of Community

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project mobilized hundreds of volunteers over the Labor Day weekend to make an immediate difference. That immediate difference is at http://www.katrinalist.net/, a searchable database of almost 400,000 PeopleFinder Interchange Format-compliant, volunteer-entered, missing and found persons reports from across the web. Having a single, searchable resource is critical due to limited internet access for evacuees and their families. The team plans to turn its attention to housing and job solutions next, creating a centralized technology solution that aggregates a comprehensive resource set from sites all across the web, standardizes them, and makes them searchable from anywhere.

Project Contributors

CivicSpace Labs (http://www.CivicSpaceLabs.org) is a funded non-profit organization and community collaborating with the Drupal (http://www.Drupal.org) project to develop a free/open-source software platform for online community organizing. CivicSpace enables bottom-up people-powered campaigns to operate on a more level playing field with more traditional top-down organizations, and, similarly, allows top-down organizations to leverage the power of grassroots organizing.

Salesforce.com Foundation (http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/index.html) was officially launched in July 2000 by Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell. The launch of the Foundation came less than a year after the launch of the company with the goal of building philanthropic programs at the very beginning of the company's existence rather than waiting until the company had reached a certain level of 'comfortable success'. Our belief is if emphasis is placed on social programs from a company's inception, the value of service will be a core cultural value that is built into the fabric of the company.

Social Source Software (http://www.social-source.com/) creates world-class software specifically for nonprofit and non-governmental organizations, usually under an open source license. Social Source Software works with organizations seeking to create enterprise grade websites, web applications, and other types of software.

Craigslist (http://www.Craigslist.org) From its humble beginnings as an e-mail newsletter sent to friends in San Francisco, Craigslist has grown to be one of the largest online community bulletin boards, with 175 Craigslist sites in all 50 US states, and 34 countries. Craigslist was one of the earliest community sites to coordinate hurricane relief, rescue and reunion for Katrina survivors.
====

If you know of shelters housing Katrina victims please make sure it is entered.



http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/ShelterFinder


http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project

Interested Techies check here:
http://katrina.internet2.edu/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderTech

===

[Der Blaue Engel]

1. Thank you for posting about it here, sarahlee

I was feeling horrible and impotent to help anyone, and this gave me something to do. I've only entered a few chunks of data in the evenings after work, but it felt good to do it. I hope that it helps bring people together.

[sarahlee]

2. The thanks go to

people like you. Without your efforts, nothing the "techies" came up with would have made any difference at all.

[sarahlee]

18. Deleted

Posted in wrong place--- too, tired.

[sarahlee]

3. 6 of the many reasons this project has been important

1] Microsoft (and thus the Red Cross - KatrinaSafe) wants our data.

2] KatrinaSafe is concentrating on data from shelters and ignoring data from the web. This is probably a good decision for them but data collected on the web is still important.

3] Nobody else is going to compile and de-dupe data from all over the web comprehensively, it is up to us.

4] KatrinaSafe is only going to alert family members when survivors
are found. There are lots of other valuable things we can do such as
putting people in contact with each-other who are looking for the same person.

5] Microsoft won't be around for all disasters. The tools and techniques we come up with need to be replicable.

====Drum Roll====
6] This was/is Open Source and belongs "To The People"!

Volunteers have done the heavy lifting, have joined the discussion list to talk directly to volunteer developers and have seen their issues resolved. This project is a fine example of American "Can Do" attitudes and exemplifies progressive values.

Thanks to all of you!

[Draill]

4. Glad the site is now up.

This was something people could do and feel they were helping, it sure helped me get over some feelings of helplessness. Thanks for letting us know about the project in the first place, sarahlee

[Draill]

5. Kick n/t

[cally]

6. Thanks for doing this...nt

[sarahlee]

7. Volunteers needed to test form for Shelter Finder

VOLUNTEERS - urgently needed for testing the new data input form for the Shelter Finder (http://www.dosima.org/katrina)] contact shelterfinder at gmail dot com

[Draill]

8. New thread needed asking for volunteers

for the shelter finder, I'd do it but I can't start threads yet. Someone please?

[soup]

9. kick

Thank you, sarahlee. :hug:

and everyone involved in this ongoing project. :grouphug:

[burrowowl]

10. Kick!

People finder might do some good. There are still alot of people looking for their loved ones!

[Draill]

11. Kick n/t

[Robeson]

12. Kick this.

[soup]

13. Volunteers needed to test form for Shelter Finder

A morning :kick: for all that's been done and to bring attention to sarahlee's post #7.

---

VOLUNTEERS - urgently needed for testing the new data input form for the Shelter Finder (http://www.dosima.org/katrina )] contact shelterfinder at gmail dot com

---

Thank you to everyone who has and can help with this vital project. :hi: :loveya: :yourock:

[AverageJoe]

14. PLEASE EVERYONE: RECOMMEND THIS THREAD!

This is important stuff. PLEASE EVERYONE: RECOMMEND THIS THREAD!

[brindis_desala]

15. Great work!

[AverageJoe]

16. Kick

:kick:

[K8-EEE]

17. I Don't Understand Why So Many Lists

It seems to me it would be better if everyone were directed to use one central list -- we are still looking for someone and there seem to be a million and one sources out there.

You would have thought FEMA would have this in place in anticipation of a national disaster, what the hell are they doing over there?

[sarahlee]

20. That was exactly the problem

FEMA and the Red Cross did NOT immediately post a centralized database so multitudes of sites sprung up to fullfill the need.

What People Finder has been doing with hours upon hours of work by an entire volunteer army, is to go through all of those other sites and scrape the data from all those other sites and put it in ONE database, which we are feeding to the Red Cross - who had no intention of doing that.

A person could be listed as missing on one site and found on another. Now, both of those post still exists, but in one location and some of the developers are now working to try and delete the duplicates.

As you can imagine and probably some of the other volunteers from DU can testify to, many of the entries left on the various forums and websites and places like Craigs list were done by very distraught individuals. There was no order or format to how the information was entered. The volunteers have tried to take that chaos and create some order from it so it is more useful and to keep distraught individuals from having to search through 20 different sites.

Additionally, volunteers are then going back to the site with the "missing post" and letting people know that person has been found. Some are also calling family members when we "find" people they are searching for.

Some of the various websites, like Yahoo's, did not want to shut theirs down, but cooperated with us and have helped to create tools that allow data entered at their site to be picked up automatically by ours so we can make certain that that information gets into the now centralized Red Cross Database.

Again, if a system had been rolled out by FEMA or the Red Cross as soon as Katrina hit, none of this work would have been necessary. But it wasn't.

Any other questions?

[sarahlee]

19. Thanks to everyone who has been keeping this kicked.

I just don't have time to stick around. Wanted to share some things with all the good volunteers from my morning mail from the developers list serv, some snippets:

===
We suddenly got so much traffic, it shut the server down - salesforce is working to correct that and distribute our database over more machines to handle the load.

====
> SuzObr: good morning - talked with a colleague last night who's
> cousin
> & her children are missing - did a search on katrinalist.net for
> <snipped out names searched for>, and found them at the houston
> astrodome. His auntie is flying from SF to pick them up, today. A
> success.
>
====

I work for a not-for-profit city-owned, privately-run utility company (water, sewer, catv, cable internet) serving to a city of 53k, a city that is currently housing over 1600 'guests' from katrina's wake. Our shelters are having trouble themselves. Two are being run by United Way, which sad to say, doesn't currently have any order to it's information. The other shelter is run by the red cross.

My company is providing 4 computers and cable internet lines (10MB down 1.5MB up) for each shelter we also have donated 12 televisions and cable tv service. My company has been looking for ways to provide data to these families.

The universal problem that all our shelters are having is that these people don't really have any computer skills, and are easily frustrated with the dis-order. I have been searching for a way to collect the names from the shelters and cross-reference the lists for the 'guests'. We have several channels devoted to serving information to the city and I have managed to make all the arrangements to broadcast, an entire list, and a select list of matches of people the shelters are looking for, but I haven't been able to get the needed data.

Until yesturday, I was talking with the red cross and they didn't seem to be interested in helping. That when I started looking around. I found this project. My office is extremely interested in helping in any way we can. I am a linux / windows programmer and dba over mysql and mssql. I hope to put my talents to work to help the cause.

Let me know if there is anything I can do. Even if it comes to serving / mirroring, My company has 2 divergent pipes totaling over 280 mbps in and out. (Sadly we only use 20% of up and 60% down, plenty of excess bandwidth for the cause.) We also have a server farm that is basically sitting idle.

I just wnat you to know, I have faith that this is the answer to a lot of people's prayers and I personally appreciate impressive amount and quality of work this project has done thus far.

Brian E<snipped rest of the name because I don't have permission to share>
Systems Analyst Administrator
Information Technology

====

From a phone call with folks on the ground working unofficially with the Red Cross at the Baton Rouge River Convention Center.

-The Red Cross is using Excel Spread Sheets to enter data in the convention center. Officially, they are being told to stop entering survivors on to websites. Not sure, could be privacy issues.
-The survivors in the convention center really, really need to find their missing loved ones. Keep up the effort, we have to get them bigger and more complete lists.

We are trying to get a copy of the format for their excel spreadsheets so we can get their on the ground SpreadSheets into Katrinalist.net.

===

I am anxious to get back to the data input. As a USA citizen living in a foreign country, it is about the only thing that I can do to feel useful in this crisis.

===

We have almost 200,000 records worth of data that has been scraped,
validated, and prepared for import. As soon as SalesForce can start
accepting large imports we will have the single largest source of
survivor information on the web. The only large data set that still
needs to be prepared is MSN (150K+ records) and that should be ready
by this afternoon.

====

Hello, thanks to everyone who contacted me. We are still waiting for
the shelter to get records to us and will share them as soon as they
get it to us.

In the meantime we need help creating a list of shelters to be
entered. Anna and Emma are coordinating volunteers. Please help
them until we can get you the spreadsheets from the shelter.

====

Katrinasafe.com
- is importing all the best data from Katrinalist.net
- will be the official new red cross, FEMA and Homeland Security Site (ap and CNN story )
- will get the bulk of media support in the next 48 hours.
- has everything in place and Microsoft paid engineer team
- has the red cross shelter support and field game in place.
- tracking and outreach partnership so people who are looking can get notices when a keyname is added to the DB. (working on this)
- be the change you want to be....make sure we are not a part of the noise we started out trying to correct. The media, family and friends really need a one site strategy.

Data work is critical. The collection of the infomal data is really important.

====

Currently putting together a site to aggregate the Stories from Katrina - so stay tuned!

[Draill]

21. Hearing some stories

of folks finding loved ones through the site is WONDERFUL! Thanks for the update, sarahlee.

[sarahlee]

22. Want to talk to the press?

----Original Message-----
From: Sue Cline
Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2005 3:24 PM
To: peoplefinder at activist-tech.org
Subject: our stories

We Want Your Stories -

Thanks to your amazing efforts, KatrinaList.net is getting lots of press attention. In addition to information about the project itself, we'd like to put together some stories about you, our amazing army of
volunteers. If you are willing to participate in print, tv, radio or blog interview, would you press reply (not reply all so we don't flood the list) and answer the following questions? I will compile all that I receive and add to the wiki as well.

1. What made you volunteer for the PeopleFinder project?

2. Tell me about yourself - what do you do when you're not volunteering for PeopleFinder?

3. How has volunteering with PeopleFinder impacted you?

4. Anything else I should know that the press would find interesting?

Your name:

Best way to contact you (phone, email, other):

Best time to reach you:

What you've been working on:

Geographic Location (city/state/country):


Thank you for helping with this -


Sue Cline
Media Coordinator
http://www.KatrinaList.net
============

If you are interested in sharing your story about working on PeopleFinder send me a PM and I will provide the email address you need.

.

[sarahlee]

23. These kids need you!

I and others have been calling shelters and people are in desperate need to know where their loved ones are. Keeping track of all the shelters is a critical step in updating our lists.

We are getting ready to launch an effort to help the Center for missing and exploited children. There are estimates that as many as 1500 children are missing related to Katrina.

Go here to help directly:
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2077

We have great data entry volunteers, who when searching the records, find connected information from a different site and are taking the time to go back and post a note or make a direct contact saying things like "I read your note from the Yahoo site and while searching I found this info at the CNN site." That is data entry with heart.

Come on DUers - these kids and families are in desperate need of your energy and time. Send me a PM and I will send you the email for the project coordinator. Or just check the Wiki
http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Main_Page


Meanwhile if someone reading this is a graphics pro, we need a logo and a small like to button for the soon to be launched (if I can finish before I fall asleep):
http://www.katrinastoriesproject.org

[Draill]

24. Kick n/t

[sarahlee]

25. Updates

Have gotten a couple of PMs asking about the background of this project. This is the link to my original post here at DU.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4638088&mesg_id=4638088


We need to make sure that people know that katrinahelp.com is NOT our site, but a possible scam site and there is nothing we can do about it.

We need volunteers to help us spread the word on the net - send the info to your email networks, post about it in other forums and blogs, etc.:

Project News & Updates for Media can be found here:
http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderPress

Media FAQ
http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Media_FAQ

Let us know who you contacted here:
http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderOutreachLists#Already_Reached

We don't really have a way to know how much our work is helping people - especially since our data is all getting dumped to the central Red Cross Database... but if you know of someone or read about someone finding a friend or relative through the use of www.katrinalist.net, we would really like to know - we need stories for:
http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Media_Stories

One volunteer wrote in today:

"I've been spending a couple of hours each night using the peoplefinder search and other web sources to look for any connections for the kids on the missing lists."

Another note just in...

NBC is going to send out the story on Katrinalist.net to all their affiliates with the national statistics and the problem for families.

For the story to be picked up we need local angles.

All volunteers, Scrapers, surfers, data entry or engineers (Yes... you if have been working to help)
Please tell us where you are located, where you are from, email and phone, Are you willing to go on TV?

Anyone contacted can be coached by media professionals for a few minutes before the call...

If you have worked on the project and are interested, be sure and list yourself under "Volunteers for Media To Contact" here:
http://katrina.internet2.edu/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderOutreach