[mob] Help Katrina victims

[Robbie Honerkamp <robbie@shorty.com>]

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, many well-meaning people and 
organizations have set up people-finder databases where people can post 
information about family and friends they're looking for - or victims 
can post information about where they are now so people looking for them 
 will know they're okay.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of these sites now with more popping up 
every day. This makes it extremely difficult to find people or be found. 
A group of people are currently working on a system to unify these 
databases into one source. And they need help. If you're a coder, they 
could use some backend help. If you can read and type, they really need 
help with data entry- many people finder databases can be "screen 
scraped" automatically, but data on others (like Craigslist) has to be 
entered manually.

http://www.katrinahelp.info/ is the Katrina Help Wiki. You can go to 
http://katrina.internet2.edu/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderVolunteer to 
volunteer for the people finder project. It's really easy- just choose a 
block of data to type in, type it in, then mark it completed.

If you need more help, we're also online in irc.freenode.net in channel 
#globalvoices.

Robbie