From
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Director of the M.I.T. Center for Future Civic
Media: an important note to techies who are concerned with the
situation in Haiti.
In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many
organizations have created sites where people could find one another,
or least information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has
been undermined by its success: within 24 hours, it became clear that
there were too many places where people were putting information; each
site became a silo.
People within the IT community recognized the danger of too many
unconnected sites, and Google became interested in helping. Google is
now running an embeddable application at:
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/
We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into
developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make
their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the
Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful
reunions.
I am not affiliated with Google — indeed, this is a volunteer
initiative by some of their engineers — but this is one case where
their reach and capacity can help the most people.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the
reasoning behind this request. Any questions about the widget or its
functionality or features are best directed to Google.
Christopher P. Csikszentmihalyi.
Director, MIT Center for Future Civic Media
csik@media.mit.edu
Tags: google, isnow, silo <BR/>