There has been a lot of coverage on Hurricane Katrina during its fifth anniversary. Marc Meyer wrote a nice post on Social Media Today, Social Media and Hurricane Katrina: What If? He was there in the week after and experienced some of the sense of isolation as many traditional means of communication were down.  Now he wonders what would have happen if services like Twitter and Facebook would have been available?

We have seen how social media and enterprise 2.0 platform shave helped in more recent disasters. See for example, Details on Enterprise 2.0 in Operation in Haiti Relief on how the TISC (Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation) was used by the US Military for better communication knowledge sharing, and coordination. The main components of the system were online forums, wikis, chat and blogs. The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as well as a platform for efficient cooperation.

It turns out that there were some uses of social media to help with Katrina. In this case it was blogs and wikis in the absence of Facebook and Twitter. The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was quickly organized through the Web by some people at Harvard’s Berkman Center. After Katrina many families were separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of Web sites gathered thousands, of entries about either missing people or people who want to let others know that they were okay. The problem was that the data on these sites had no particular form or structure. So it was almost impossible for people to search or match things up.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project enlisted virtual volunteers to enter data about missing and found people from the various online sources. It was promoted through blogs and the interface for administering the effort was a wiki. If I remember correctly over 20,000 volunteers were enlisted in a few days through the blog alerts. I did some work on this. You could do it anytime you wanted for as much time as you had available from your own office or home using your own computer. You took data from one of many separate databases and added it into a new central one with a common searchable structure.

This work gave me a closer personal look at the displaced people from my home town of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Some of the individual stories emerged. It is small thing to do but you saw the names of people directly impacted by Katrina and hopefully helped a few people find people or get notified of the status of these people close to them.  The social media tools have gotten more sophisticated and efficient since Katrina but they were in play there thanks to a few individuals at the Berkman Center and the thousands of volunteers they enlisted.