Your personal connection to Katrina

Lou linked to an inspiring report of Alan Gutierrez’s wiki set up in the wake of hurricane Katrina…

When I awoke, I found that the Xavier families, has simply kept the Wiki page going without me. I cleaned up the their markup, buth the information is there.

Now, I’m finding the page gets updated, nice and neat.

Xavier Wiki

Wiki works.

I received a request by more pedestrian means — email — from old university friend Shel who safely fled New Orleans for Florida but who must now settle anew sans possessions. Her list of things needed made it easy for me to provide specific help to someone I care about, lifting me (selfishly, I know) out of a feeling of uselessness here in NYC.

And I started to think how others might do the same. Who do we know, or who is in our network, that was affected? How can we find out? We have tools now. Social network software like LinkedIn lets you search by number of degrees from you and zip code (here’s FEMA’s list of aid-eligible areas, New Orleans is 70112).