Wiki At Cross Purposes
I’m removing older stuff from the Think New Orleans Wiki, and remembering how difficult it was to manage when I was in Ann Arbor. Part of the problem with the Wiki during evacuation was that people who volunteered didn’t see the value of anything less than urgent information.
They were quick to rework the front page to include links to the Red Cross, CNN, ABC, BBC, FEMA, bascially, the front page of Yahoo! or similar.
What I wanted to create was a neibhorhood by neighborhood resource, and leave the hard news and people finding tasks to others. I wanted to start to focus on rebuilding, rather than evacation, because even from Ann Arbor, I could see that there were people that were ready to get back to work immediately.
You’ll see in the history of the main page, the original neighborhood directory. How strange to find myself to deeply involved with the Neighborhoods Planning Network six months down the road.
Unfortunately, it was hard to keep everyone focused on the less urgent information. When I removed links to articles about the Superdome, people thought I was mad. It was simply that everyone knew about the Superdome, how awful it was, but few people knew about the community patrols that were being organized in the French Quarter and Uptown.
I wanted to create a resource for those that were organizing early.
Now, nine months later, I see that there is still a online civic resource that is neighborhood focused, and in the hands of the citizens. Please help me build the Think New Orleans Wiki. A web site that any citizen or friend can edit.
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I guess I need to learn more about Wiki’s.
Count me in. I’m already in. GG, it’s nothing to figure out.
GG, it’s nothing to figure out.
It is very simple to markup the doucments. It is all about collaborative authoring.
Look at recent changes and see how much of my cruft Maitri has cleaned up already.
If you have stuff and you don’t know what do with it, dump it as best you can on your user page.
http://thinknola.com/wiki/User:Morwen
Put something there for now and we can start working on it. I’m going to have to create a getting started page, but you can check out A Gentle Introduction to Media Wiki and Help Editing.
Thank you for your interested and support.
Cool, Mark.
Do note that the information in place is stuff that was cut and paste from various news sources. Within the Wiki there was ernest effort on the part of my friends in Ann Arbor. Ric Hayman from Australia was very helpful maintaining St Bernard Parish information.
It’s not releveant information any longer, so we can being to retire it, and replace it with considered articles. Though, it was very helpful, and Ed Vielmetti began to work out the category system, and began applying categories.
Also, I’m going to have to thank Ann Arbor’s Community High School, because I’m going to adopt their template, and have already adopted their layout. I’m sure it’s permissable under the GNU Documentation License, but I’ll ask to make sure, because I’d like to use a completly unrestriced license for Think New Orleans writings.
Thank you, Mark.
[...] Matt has a login at the Think New Orleans Wiki. He contributed to the Wiki, in accordance with its mission, back in the first incaration. [...]
Deborah
It was nice to have the introduction from Ed Vielmetti. I’m now forcing communication over to my weblogs, because email is ineffective. I invite you to please communicate with me here, so that I am not the hub nor bottle neck of Think New Orleans, so that other people might chime in and work with your ideas.
As noted in the post above I launched a Wiki to help people organize for the longer term, not the immediate term, since the Internet was not the network for such a task. It could have been used to a much greater effect by FEMA and the DHS, but it wasn’t. It was a failure on the part of the federal government that people finders were not employed, and that is failure of of the DHS.
At the time of Katrina I worked on a people finder that I felt was successful in gathering names, and providing people with a place to connect.
http://familymessages.org/
I was able to connect with people through that site myself.
The Internet fell down, however. I’ve often said that this was a Web 2.0 boondoggle as advanced Internet users begged New Orleanians to come use weblog, which I wrote about in “Failure 2.0″:http://blogometer.com/2006/05/03/failure-20/, so that helping New Orleanians would be interesting for them. New Orleans does use the Internet, but they use email. The best disaster response would be to lift hotmail quotas, and to mirror the tulane.edu, uno.edu, xavier.edu domains, which would cover a lot of employees.