We all want to help out the victims of the Hurricane Katrina disaster... but there are some things we can't overlook in our efforts...

A wise man once told me that it's not always useful to point out problems if you can't help offer a solution... so for each of the points below, you can find how we seek to address them in bold.

It's dangerous to post public lists with personal information!

We've seen numerous sites which are basically large, public databases of people's personal information. While the operators of these sites are 100% to be thanked for their efforts... there are effective ways to help people get back in touch without exposing them to risks.

Posting up personal data (such as email, phone number, address) puts them at risk to:

• Identity Theft
• Unsolicited Email (SPAM)
• Unsolicited Postal Mail

Unsolicited postal and e-mail are certainly the last of our worries (I know many of us would gladly receive stacks of SPAM every day for the rest of our lives just to hear our loved ones are safe right now). However, the last thing that people who have lost their homes and livelihoods need is to also fall victim to identity theft because their personal information was made readily available on the internet by people who were trying to help them out.

It's even more dangerous to take a list containing hundreds or even thousands of people's personal information... we are serving up these people's personal information on a silver platter to any malicious party who happens to come along!

This site is designed to help people get back in touch without exposing either party to the unnecessary risks of someone stealing their personal information.

Forums aren't an efficient way to collect, organize, or export data.

We understand 100% that most places (new stations, websites, etc) were already running forums before Katrina hit... and in the wake of the event forums were a quick way to create a way for people to post up looking for loved ones. These people are definitely to be commended for their quick thinking in getting these sites set up.

However, when you post on a forum, you're just creating one long block of unorganized text... typing names, addresses, phone numbers, etc into a paragraph. While the paragraph might be readable by a human, it's very hard to separate and organize the paragraph you typed into a database or data file.

Because of this difficulty.. it becomes very hard to sort the data, search through it effectively, and export it into file formats which are usable by organizations in their relief efforts. Information that's been entered into forums posts is going to be very hard to share with relief organizations or other sites to aid in their rescue efforts.

I would love to be proven wrong here and have someone send us an insane Perl/python/SQL/whatever script they have developed which can parse through forum posts and extract names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and "status sentences", and other relevant data into separate fields. If anyone can do that... we can aggregate a whole stack of information from all the forums people have posted in and put it into a common format for delivery to relief organizations! Help, /.!

This site is designed to gather data and store it into a properly indexed and organized database, where it can easily be searched, sorted, cleaned, and exported for relief organizations. If you have data you'd like us to import... read here!

We need a common format and master data store to collect and aggregate missing/searching/safe lists

It's very cool that so many different people and organizations have stepped to the plate and helped establish searching/safe/missing person's lists... donating their time, talents, and resources to try and help other people in this crisis.

However... we've almost got a case of too many cooks in the kitchen here. With so many different websites, lists, and forums... it's quite possible for people to pass like ships in the night... within 10 feet of each other, but completely unaware of each other. You might post your "searching for" info on one site... and your family might have already posted that they were safe on another. Because the two sites aren't talking to each other... you're not going to find each other that way.

To make sure you've looked everywhere.. you need to go to over 30 different websites and do exhaustive searches on each, sometimes in forums, sometimes by plying through a huge alphabetical list, sometimes by clicking on hundreds of forum posts looking for the person you seek. There is a better way. even if you find who you're looking for... there is so much data out there that needs to be brought together so it can be provided to relief organizations.

We are creating a data specification to use when capturing information on missing persons, modeled after police missing person's reports, to try and capture as much relevant information about people in a format that is organized, standardized, documented, and interchangeable. Click here to view more info on the Missing/Safe Person's File Specification

In addition, we are offering to import into one central location (our database) any data which can be provided to us in this format, and asking that sites which have been collecting data dump to our central location and link to our data entry page so we can maintain a central "master" data repository. We can't keep growing 50 different silos that aren't talking and sharing data or sweeping it to a central location!

If you run a site that's collecting information, contact us so we can work together!