ReliefSource

Despite the terrible impact of Hurricane Katrina, it has been very positive to see the technology community using a wide range of tools to support the response. Particularly in areas such as family tracing and volunteer matching, many initiatives have been started privately, and resources such as Google Maps have really come into their own as a way of distributing information. I’m keeping a watch list of websites and articles on the use of technology in the Katrina response. You can find the (regularly updated) list on my del.icio.us roll, at del.icio.us/paulcurrion/katrina.

These initiatives are fantastic, and I’m loving the fact that so many of them are fairly spontaneous. The group that I’m involved with on the Sahana project are trying to field the prototype version, working with some volunteers in the US. I hope that we’re able to prove some concepts in this response.

However, two things occur to me:

1. Fantastic as these initiatives are, they are fragmented and unco-ordinated - much like any humanitarian response in the world, to be honest. However this is massively inefficient, and we don’t meet the needs of people and communities as quickly and appropriately as we should. Are there ways of rapidly developing network organisations to co-ordinate these initiatives, without destroying the volunteer spirit, spontaneity and inventiveness of the decentralised approach?

2. Despite the similarities in the response, this isn’t a humanitarian crisis like the ones I normally deal with. Aside from Kobe ten years ago, this is one of the few serious humanitarian emergencies that has taken place in an urbanised area in a highly-developed country. Many similar needs to an event like the Asia tsunami - housing, family tracing, victim identification, etc - but the operational environment is radically different - excellent infrastructure, functioning government, abundance of resources. At this point, it’s hard to see where to draw lessons - and easy for this event to skew funding availability and the development of useful tools for humanitarian responses in other parts of the world.