Notes for Lessons Learned When We Finish/Debrief

[Nancy White]

Just a place to keep some notes about what we learn. I found a lot of the lessons from Katrina and other events is mostly in people's heads or distributed across the net. What can we learn? What can we improve?

[Nancy White]

Verifying Emergency Phone Numbers

Call and verify any known emergency numbers as early in the game as possible so we don't tie up lines.

Have a blank template storage wiki
* Who is doing what
* sample pages

[Erin Handy]

awesome to see the experienced activists take leadership.

i think that helping wiki newbies figure out how to jump in & get involved right away could be improved.

i'm overwhelmed with knowing how to get involved. having forums track to-do is non-efficient (from my perspective). it would be great to see a high/medium/low priority list for to do items with time estimates for engagement. this would allow someone like me who has a couple hours come in and do focused work rather than weed thru various discussions and still not know where to plug in.

ty so much for all your work!

[Andy Carvin]

I was talking to Al Tompkins at Poynter.org about this earlier today. I would love to have an expert in the proper type of analysis come in and do a case study on us, so we can see what worked and what didn't, and perhaps come up with recommendations on what infrastructure we really need to have in place. We've also had some good chats with folks at Google and Stanford about having teams ready to deploy maps, with access to the right data layers. Would be great if the legacy of this effort would be that we don't have to reinvent the wheel entirely each time - though we have to be nimble enough to incorporate new social media tools...

[Andy Carvin]

yeah, we should investigate if other tools like Basecamp or SocialText should be used in parallel. Ning definitely had its strengths, but tracking to-do items hasn't been easy.

Erin Handy said:

awesome to see the experienced activists take leadership.

i think that helping wiki newbies figure out how to jump in & get involved right away could be improved.

i'm overwhelmed with knowing how to get involved. having forums track to-do is non-efficient (from my perspective). it would be great to see a high/medium/low priority list for to do items with time estimates for engagement. this would allow someone like me who has a couple hours come in and do focused work rather than weed thru various discussions and still not know where to plug in.

ty so much for all your work!

[Nancy White]

Yes and.... I think if WE took time to do an analysis, we'd surface quite a bit. I suspect the expertise exists within the network. The challenge is time.

Andy Carvin said:

I was talking to Al Tompkins at Poynter.org about this earlier today. I would love to have an expert in the proper type of analysis come in and do a case study on us, so we can see what worked and what didn't, and perhaps come up with recommendations on what infrastructure we really need to have in place. We've also had some good chats with folks at Google and Stanford about having teams ready to deploy maps, with access to the right data layers. Would be great if the legacy of this effort would be that we don't have to reinvent the wheel entirely each time - though we have to be nimble enough to incorporate new social media tools...

[Debbie Cerda]

agreed, although some of the discussion I'd rather hope to have offline. If you really want to make a difference, it's important to know where your efforts are well-received, and where they'll fall on deaf ears.
I'd love to meet up with anyone who will be in Austin for SXSW Interactive 2009, but willing to chat even sooner.

[Debbie Cerda]

I think it's great that you've focused on using the new technologies available, along with welcoming the old skool of interdictor and other resources. I'd recommend looking at greater coverage of the public.

Getting the accessibility community involved as well would help for folks with disabilities and language barriers. The inherent universal design in accessibility standards helps with access via mobile devices as well. A good group to talk to would be the UT Accessibility Institute if it's allowed to continue. I'm sure many of the folks associated with Knowbility could either assist, or provide additional contacts. And there's also Deaflink who's committed to providing equal protection to all.

Now who can build the iPhone apps?

Andy Carvin said:

I was talking to Al Tompkins at Poynter.org about this earlier today. I would love to have an expert in the proper type of analysis come in and do a case study on us, so we can see what worked and what didn't, and perhaps come up with recommendations on what infrastructure we really need to have in place. We've also had some good chats with folks at Google and Stanford about having teams ready to deploy maps, with access to the right data layers. Would be great if the legacy of this effort would be that we don't have to reinvent the wheel entirely each time - though we have to be nimble enough to incorporate new social media tools...

[Jessica Clark]

Hi, Andy:
I was actually thinking that the Center for Social Media might want to do a case study/analysis on this—it might be interesting to think about the best way to tap into the expertise of the network to do a sort of distributed analysis that would match the distributed nature of the organizing. Let me know if you want to follow up on this idea once the storm and its aftermath have passed.

~Jessica Clark

Nancy White said:

Yes and.... I think if WE took time to do an analysis, we'd surface quite a bit. I suspect the expertise exists within the network. The challenge is time.

Andy Carvin said:

I was talking to Al Tompkins at Poynter.org about this earlier today. I would love to have an expert in the proper type of analysis come in and do a case study on us, so we can see what worked and what didn't, and perhaps come up with recommendations on what infrastructure we really need to have in place. We've also had some good chats with folks at Google and Stanford about having teams ready to deploy maps, with access to the right data layers. Would be great if the legacy of this effort would be that we don't have to reinvent the wheel entirely each time - though we have to be nimble enough to incorporate new social media tools...

[Erin Handy]

hey there andy,

it could also just be as simple as a page on the wiki with a running updated list that people take a to-do and move it to the wip part of the list. so the structure could be:

to do - ordered by importance

OPEN

high priority
- task id 1 (estimate x time - ie 2 hrs)
description of task & links to needed information
posted by: xxx
- task id 2 (estimate x time - ie 20 mins)
description of task & links to needed information
posted by: xxx

medium priority
- task id 3 (estimate x time)
description of task & links to needed information
posted by: xxx

low priority
- task id 4 (estimate x time)
description of task & links to needed information
posted by: xxx


WIP

user who take a task from above please move to this section until completed

high priority
- task list w/ id # & adopted by contact info and date adopted

medium priority
- task list w/ id # & adopted by contact info and date adopted

low priority
- task list w/ id # & adopted by contact info and date adopted

in verification
- task list w/ id # & previous information help w/ date adopted for verification & contact info added


DONE, needs verification

high, medium, low again here
- task list w/ id # & adopted by contact info and date adopted, add the date done
when a task is is verification it would be moved back to the Open list under "In Verification"


DONE, verified or closed

could be a running list by date/time or sorted by high, medium, low


/////

hth, just an idea and a low-tech solution that keeps it all on the wiki


Andy Carvin said:

yeah, we should investigate if other tools like Basecamp or SocialText should be used in parallel. Ning definitely had its strengths, but tracking to-do items hasn't been easy.

Erin Handy said:

awesome to see the experienced activists take leadership.

i think that helping wiki newbies figure out how to jump in & get involved right away could be improved.

i'm overwhelmed with knowing how to get involved. having forums track to-do is non-efficient (from my perspective). it would be great to see a high/medium/low priority list for to do items with time estimates for engagement. this would allow someone like me who has a couple hours come in and do focused work rather than weed thru various discussions and still not know where to plug in.

ty so much for all your work!

[B.K. DeLong]

I have a lot of lessons learned. I tried to get The Interdictor Project restarted too fast publicly before we had the infrastructure to support it. I also didn't think about the true goals of the project and how we could interface with the huge change in social networking since Katrina.

We tried to keep the project going after Katrina and it didn't work. At a minimum, we need to have a process in place to archive it like a timecapsule of questions to ask before unearthing it for reuse.

[Thomas Broadus]

With Hurricane Hanna bearing down on East Coast and Ike looking to be in the gulf within a week, we may not have much time before we get right back into it. Perhaps already putting things in place such as hurricane wikis could be done as soon as a list of named storms comes out. If nothing else to hold the name.

[Jon Lebkowsky]

We had these same conversations after Katrina, and there were some limited case studies of the PeopleFinder/ShelterFinder project. I think those conversations and reports had some influence, and I get the sense that FEMA and the Red Cross have been pretty effective with Gustav, though it's hard to see how they could have done worse than they did with Katrina, and it's not a fair comparison because Gustav, terrible as it is, is not the same level of disaster.

I think it would have been worthwhile to have pulled in some of the people who, like me, were involved in the response to Katrina, because we had learned a lot. On the other hand, it appears that this response has been pretty effective. Thank god we don't have the same chaos we had post-Katrina, and after signing up to work on this earlier today, I've found myself wondering if there's as much to do as there was then.

There'll be far worse disasters, though, and real challenges around those. And while I said FEMA and Red Cross are more effective, I'd like to see scrutiny of their performance... I'd rather see an assessment of overall response than assessment just of this particular effort.

Andy wonders about tools we might use, but I think the Ning/MediaWiki combo felt sufficient. There was a pretty effective response to the Southeast Asian Tsunami using only a blogspot blog, though we discussed then how a wiki would have been better, hence the katrinahelp wiki, which also became hq for PeopleFinder and ShelterFinder.

What we probably need is an analysis based on several disasters of what really needs to happen, what might be needed for some disasters that we haven't seen as a need before, and what kinds of responses we'd be coordinating with (e.g. the FEMA and Red Cross analyses), and what organizations might be needed, or might already exist, than can maintain a ready system for response.