(ISF) Re: Disaster Preparedness - Redux

Deborah and list,

I feel your pain.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was excellent!

I found out about about the PFIF 1.1 while working in the Houston Astrodome. Yahoo! had taken a different approach and made a meta-crawler for the 50 or 60 sites

So without boring you with past activities in this email:

http://yodel.yahoo.com/2006/08/29/the-long-slow-road-to-recovery/

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/jame_sj

What is happening now.

1.) There is a group of Companies, NGOs, and Individuals dedicated to extending PFIF to becoming something that can be standardized internationally.

2.) During Katrina we noticed some of the more functional sites for Family linking activities could not handle their bandwidth requirements. Yahoo! Hosted familymessages.org until the bandwidth requirements were low enough for Dan to resume ownership. Yahoo! has made this process easier to do in the future. By setting aside machines in a couple of datacenters (US and UK) that will be ready for this type of work 24/7.

3.) Leveraging our Yahoo! for Good Scrum program (http://brand.yahoo.com/forgood/campaigns/scrum.html) we will be building some systems that could aid in some of the interagency collaboration problems that occur during massive disasters. This project is based on feedback from meetings and/or conferences with:

National and International governmental orgs, NGOs, and NGO consultants, and first hand experiences.

What do you or (y'all) feel is the greatest need going forward?

My vote is international humanitarian data standards. With standards collaboration of disprate systems becomes less of a hassle.

James

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>>(A version of this item - with live links - is available at
<http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2006/8/29/2275565.html>.)>>

Have you consulted with disability organizations? Have contacts with some of the disability related people doing Universal Design work?

As you probably know, a lot of computer access programs for people with blindness and limited motor ability in fingers and hands, are not very compatible with what's out there.

For instance, .pdf docs are ridiculously difficult to read with JAWS the speech program used by a lot of blind folks. Given that Adobe is trying to come up with a document format that is cross platform, I don't know why they haven't cleared this up-- they do know about it.

A rule of thumb: Work to protect the most vulnerable -- people with disabilities, elders, children -- and everyone will have a higher level of protection.

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>>; 1.) There is a group of Companies, NGOs, and Individuals dedicated to extending PFIF to becoming something that can be standardized internationally. >>