Prepping for Ike

[Andy Carvin]

I know it's a little absurd asking this as Hanna is dumping torrential rains on my house, but I wanted to make sure everyone is paying attention to Hurricane Ike. Ike was supposed to head to Miami, but now it looks like it's gonna flank Florida to the left and make a beeline to the Gulf Coast.

The last thing the Gulf Coast needs is a hurricane potentially bigger than Gustav, but we have some time to prep for it. It probably won't affect the Gulf Coast until the end of next week, and we've already built out a number of resources for the region because of Gustav.

So I wanted to create a discussion about what we can do better to improve upon the content we pulled together for Gustav (and Hanna). Is there anything we should do differently for Ike? Anything we should keep exactly the same? Do any of our teams need more volunteers to do their jobs? Do we need new teams to form around certain projects?

I know this has been tiring for all of us, but hopefully the work we've done so far will make it a lot easier to proceed. Thanks again for all of your hard work. -andy

[Nancy Babyak]

Since I haven't seen it mentioned... and i haven't tried myself... what is the mobile look and feel like for the maps / wiki.

Agreed that people in places like Texas may get to the right place thanks to road signs... but special needs / pet owners from other states seem to be the sweet spot (at least to me) of needing the information from the maps and Shelter lists... unless i Have the target wrong...


Happy to be corrected... just want to be as helpful as possible per pot of coffee :-)

[Earl McGehee]

In an ideal world the states would have this data on the web in something like a real-time feed so for example evacuation routes could be adjusted as needed to reflect traffic conditions, road construction, storm damage, etc. The data we are trying to map or put on our wed site is often not available in machine readable format. Maybe before next Hurricane we can have this site a little more sophisticated so that volunteers here could type in evacuation center addresses in a screen form where they would be available in a list or a map automatically. That would also allow us to import data from a government agency into our database.

I just spent a few hours in the sad real world mapping evacuation routes for south Florida from official government sources. Florida brags about spending more on storm preparedness than any other state. Their evacuation routes are published in PDF files for each county. If I lived there I would have to guess where I wanted to go then find a map of Florida counties and print out all the counties I might pass through from their listing in alphabetical order. And there is a disclaimer on the page that says these maps are outdated and may not be correct. If I dig around longer there is probably a better way, but then the storm may have passed by the time I figure it out.

We are performing a valuable public service if we can pull together some of all this information in an easier to absorb form. We should be able to mobilize volunteers that have first hand local knowledge of impacted area but who no longer live there so they can add assemble and interpret info in a way that a computer or stranger cannot.

Nancy Babyak said:

how can we pull maps and shelter pages together so that information only has to be entered once?

[Steve Laufer]

What's the current strategy as to the wiki visibility?
It's hard to find on the page and there's lots of good info there.

If you've already gone over this, please refer me to threads if possible.

[Andy Carvin]

If you can't find an example on another page that you can use as a model, you can propose what you think is the appropriate syntax. I'm sure John and Deanna can offer feedback on if it's the right approach. But please don't see us as a bottleneck in regards to getting started.
Nancy Babyak said:

Agreed, but with Jo hot on Ikes Heels places may start to take Alabama's approach.... they announced that they would open different shelters for Hanna if they were needed because different places were hit and that way services from different states / regions / agencies could concentrate on a fewer # of shelters.

The Wiki now has categories and if those feed directly into a specific map that's great... just need to know the syntax for the entry so it goes in the right direction.

Brad Banner said:

The evacuation routes will be the same. The helplines should be the same. The shelters will probably be the same. Each state does shelter co-ordination differently it seems.

I

[John Walling]

Nancy,

If you want to direct a user to a specific map page, use the standard link [[page-title]].

If you want to give users a list of map pages to choose from, link to [[Maps Contents Page]]: or use item 1 below.

If you create a map page:
1. Insert a navigation template at the page bottom: {{MapTOC}} ,
2. Add a categories at the page bottom: [[Category:Maps]] , and location, e.g. [[Category:Florida]], and storm, e.g. [[Category:Ike]]
3. Add the new map page link to the Maps TOC page at [[Maps Contents Page]]
4. Update {{MapTOC}}, (ask me if you need help with the template)

References:
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Maps_Contents_Page
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Template:MapTOC
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Category:Maps
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Category:Florida
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Category:Ike

John Walling




Nancy Babyak said:

The Wiki now has categories and if those feed directly into a specific map that's great... just need to know the syntax for the entry so it goes in the right direction.

[Nancy Babyak]

Earl,

Would it be possible to have a shared Google spreadsheet (or some other format some other place) that volunteers can enter the shelter information and have it appear on one of your maps?

[Earl McGehee]

Probably. We can create a shared spreadsheet. I would need to experiment to see how to get it loaded in the maps. The standard input method requires latitude and longitude for each shelter to place it on the map. If we had addresses maybe Google could look up the location. We also need to have a way to get the spreadsheet loaded into a shelters page - like in a table. I assume we don't want to require the user to have a spreadsheet to find a shelter.

There is a database as part of this wiki - we should be able to have a screen form for entering a shelter into the database then extract that data into a map.

Let me play with a spreadsheet and see how this works before we look at a data entry screen.

if anyone else already has experience doing this please speak up.

Earl McGehee

Nancy Babyak said:

Earl,

Would it be possible to have a shared Google spreadsheet (or some other format some other place) that volunteers can enter the shelter information and have it appear on one of your maps?

[Nancy Babyak]

Thanks Earl! I'm not a Wiki expert... but I looked around the web tonight an couldn't find a turnkey way to do this...

Thanks for giving it a try!


tag a name and addy once with map name and have a pin created on the map at that location with the name designated in a dynamic format that could determine that someone was on a mobile device and return the proper format (text, low band map, high band map, sliced bread)


Earl McGehee said:

Probably. We can create a shared spreadsheet. I would need to experiment to see how to get it loaded in the maps. The standard input method requires latitude and longitude for each shelter to place it on the map. If we had addresses maybe Google could look up the location. We also need to have a way to get the spreadsheet loaded into a shelters page - like in a table. I assume we don't want to require the user to have a spreadsheet to find a shelter.

There is a database as part of this wiki - we should be able to have a screen form for entering a shelter into the database then extract that data into a map.

Let me play with a spreadsheet and see how this works before we look at a data entry screen.

if anyone else already has experience doing this please speak up.

Earl McGehee

Nancy Babyak said:

Earl,

Would it be possible to have a shared Google spreadsheet (or some other format some other place) that volunteers can enter the shelter information and have it appear on one of your maps?

[Earl McGehee]

I found some tools for taking a spreadsheet of addresses, looking them up and adding latitude and longitude then creating a file for Google Maps. This would be a multi-step manual process but faster than entering everything twice.

Someone on the maps team has requested a plugin be added to this wiki server that might be a help to us for this as well. I don't think they have had time to do this yet.

My programming skills are sadly outdated. I believe in keeping things simple - there should be an easier way to do all this, but it probably costs lots of money.

I'll work on this some more tomorrow. I hope we can get these sorts of things worked out before next hurricane season. With things happening so fast in the last week or so I decided it was better to just brute force putting data in rather than spending too much time trying to figure out a better way.

Nancy Babyak said:

Thanks Earl! I'm not a Wiki expert... but I looked around the web tonight an couldn't find a turnkey way to do this...
Thanks for giving it a try!

[John Walling]

Category update

I reviewed and added categories to most pages. The few remaining pages to be given categories are here: http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Special:UncategorizedPages All are interdictor pages and I will finish them off this weekend.

I made See also the last subject/header for each page to make it easier to edit categories.

I added a couple of categories to help track pages needing attention:
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Category:Stub
http://hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_cleanup

John Walling

[Earl McGehee]

I am officially putting this on the back burner for now. There are lots of things out there but I cannot find anything that does just what we need that doesn't involve programming or money. I hope we can go back to this when there isn't a hurricane in the Caribbean.
On thing we have done on some maps is put clickable areas to go to a web site so instead of entering every shelter point we you can click on Florida and go to the Florida Red Cross shelter site.

Of course if some other reader knows of an easy, reliable way to import addresses in Excel and GeoCode them and load into Google Maps please reply to this and let us know.

Nancy Babyak said:

Thanks Earl! I'm not a Wiki expert... but I looked around the web tonight an couldn't find a turnkey way to do this...

Thanks for giving it a try!

[Blogs2c.com]

Andy,

I can make dynamically updated pages with our masthead on them for the complete list of NOAA feeds that you found earlier.

I will only take me a few minutes.

Will look like:

http://assistdir.com/noaa_nhc_at5.html

Want them?

--Brian