Weblog
Aug 30, 03:29 pm: Microformats and disaster relief
In Disaster Preparedness, Deborah Elizabeth Finn uses the opportunity of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to reflect on the progress we’ve made toward a Recovery 2.0. She laments that we haven’t done more to prepare for the inevitable.
There is, I think (I think!), a simple way that we can be better prepared to assist when the next, inevitable, disaster hits: microformats.
During Hurricane Katrina, a lot of hours went into taking all of the unstructured, missing persons data that worried individuals were dumping into newspaper message, church and school message boards. Microformats, which provides a way to identify information that’s more commonly associated with a database, could be a way around this.
hCard is a format for marking an individuals contact information so that applications know what the data is. For example, add Smartzilla to Firefox and then jump on over to Chris Messina’s contact information. A simple right click and the information gets dumped into all the right fields in Microsoft Outlook (or the address book of your choice). You can even (easily!) set this up on your own website using the hCard creator.
So, what if we make something like the hCard creator but specifically to capture missing person data? What happens? You distribute to all the places people turn up to look for their loved ones — newspapers and other community-based websites — and ask them to put it on the side of their message boards. Something like “Posting information about a missing person. Please use this to get the proper code.” Or something better written. In an emergency, the promote the hell out of that link so that everyone uses it.
What’s needed to make this work? Well, am I right? Is this a way of structuring the data and pulling it all into a central repository (or just providing a way for the folks at the Red Cross and other helping orgs to search for names of people lost and found)?
So, if my understanding is right then someone needs to make the version of the hCard creator that provides structure for missing persons data.
Any takers?
tagged: microformats, hcard, hcardcreator, recovery2.0
Christ Messina
Hey Marnie,
What would you want to be included in such a format that hCard currently lacks? Just getting folks to publish their hCards seems like a good step forward, so I’m curious to know what other information would be useful for the situation you mention.
Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Dear Marnie: Rock on! Let’s all keep thinking, and let’s all keep talking about what it will take to do better. Maybe the next disaster will be weather-related, and maybe it will be terrorism-related, but I just know that the need to be prepared is urgent. Warm regards froWarm rregfromregardsreg
Marnie Webb
Chris,
When people were plugging missing person info into the message boards they often included who a person was related to and when/where the person was last known to have been (which might not be the same as their address). As I see it, tweaking the hCard creator so that it has those questions and marks them up as appropriate (I’m not sure where) and then distributing that tweaked version so that it sits on the places where people start dumping in the “Has anyone seen Joe Wilson, he’s Patty Wilson’s husband and was in New Orleans for business staying at the W Hotel” kind of messages.
Then it would be easy enough (easy being a relative term) to work with folks like the Red Cross to be able to pull that data and match it to the data they collect in their databases.
Eric Leland
So an effective hcard system still rests on folks adopting the tool, although it is definitely a simple code challenge if you get folks attention. Wondering… if the reality of a crisis is that many well meaning folks will throw up some collection utility, seems like this effort would need to get a widget in the hands of newspapers and other resources well in advance of an emergency.
The widget is a simple web application that collects data, in the right format (hcard for example) and pipes it to a central system or a few key systems as appropriate. A newspaper would simply post their call to action and enable the widget for any emergency, and know that the data is both available on their site as they choose, but is also logged in a more central disaster assistance org like the Red Cross. The red cross would in turn enable syndication of this data, back to the local source and other relevant locations. Certain key fields would be consistant across any disaster, others could be enabled or disabled as needed. This might allow for some key centralizaiton, while not burdening small community orgs with a lot of hoops to go through to enable the widget.
Marnie Webb
Eric,
I agree that there’s a communications/PR/adoption effort that’s about all the various bulletin boards making the widget you talk about (I’m thinking of a tweaked version of hCard creator).
I think, though, that then there's a role for salesforce or someone else to make their system microformat friendly. Then all the volunteer has to do is right click on hCard formated data to get it pumped into the central repository. Rather than spending their time transfering information from one format to the other.