New Orleans Begins to Develop Indigenous Recovery Software
Coming soon. By coming soon, I mean check back Monday. Seriously.
I’m just back from Burton Group Catalyst 2008 and I’m getting a lot of traffic from the Network World article How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software where John Fontana has asked you to look around Think New Orleans.
Thank you Network World readers for visiting. Of course, I’ve been so busy preparing to speak at Catalyst 2008 that I’ve not had much time to update lately.
Please stop by again on Monday. I’ll tell you more about our new collaboration to create GIS guided block by block surveys that neighborhood organizations can perform themselves. It’s part of a partnership with Tulane School of Architecture, Mapufacture, Orleans Parish Communication District, Mid-City Neighborhood Organization and Beacon of Hope. Recovery is taking place at the neighborhood level.
Neighborhood organizations are primary organizational unit of the recovery. When a neighborhood recovers, that neighborhood needs data to measure the progress of their recovery. They need to know who’s back and if they are not back, what they plan on doing. These surveys have been conducted by clipboard and fed into desktop spreadsheets. Kathrine Cargo from Orleans Parish Communication District, GIS professional Tom Nehrbas, and MCNO Housing Committee chair Jenifer Farwell are work to create an ArcGIS database with an accompanying standardized survey, questions that a block captain can answer about a house looking at it form the curb.
This data collection needs a way to display, so Andrew Turner of Mapufacture, Francine StockM of the Tulane School of Architecture and Jeannette Gutierrez are collaborating on GIS presentation software. This tool will allow people to create a focused map of a particular issue using a library of point sets, boundaries, and historic maps. People will be able to reference their Flickr photo journals in the maps, so that they can present solutions.
We hope to have an appication as impressive as the Repopulation Indicators Map created by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center with the help of neogeographer James Fee.
We’ve been busy since our presentation at NetSquared brought Andrew, Francine and I together to define the web geography component of this software.
This is something I didn’t get to in my presentation. We are beginning to develop a capacity to create our own software to meet the needs of our recovery, though the same open social patterns we’ve adopted in our collaborations to gut our houses and plan our recovery.
1 Comment | 1 Trackback |
comments feed  |
Comments are wide open over at the GIS forum where discussion of this project is in full swing.
[...] week, Alan Gutierrez gave an excellent presentation at the Burton Catalyst Group titled “How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed … or “Innovating Your Way Out of Total System Failure” . Get the slide deck (powerpoint, [...]