RConversation

FEMA Spoils System: Bloomberg

My friend, Bloomberg correspondent Mike Forsythe, has given me permission to reproduce his article on FEMA in full, as it's not easily available online:

FEMA Spoils System Leaves Few Experts Managing Crisis Agency

By Michael Forsythe
     Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency's upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management.
     Director Michael Brown served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade before coming to FEMA in 2001. Acting Deputy Director Patrick Rhode is a veteran of Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler worked in the White House in 2001 planning presidential trips.
     The lack of experience among Brown's top lieutenants in responding to disasters was revealed by Hurricane Katrina, said Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University. It also marks a reversion to the days when the agency was treated as a ``turkey farm'' -- a place where political operatives could get high-level jobs -- after being led by professionals during
the Clinton administration, he said.
     ``These guys kind of have a deer-in-the headlights look; they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows,'' said Light, the founding director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group. ``I'm afraid FEMA has gone backwards in time to the old era of a more traditional campaign-loyalty position.''

Wow!! Katrina People Finder is up

Thanks to the heroic efforts of 2100 volunteers who spent the last 4 days manually entering data from 87,000 records scattered all over the internet, plus about two dozen people who organized, programmed and designed, people who can't find their loved ones now have hope of finding them by searching at katrinalist.net. 

Ethan Zuckerman, one of the core people involved with the project has a detailed account of how KatrinaList was built.

Recovery 2.0

Jeff Jarvis has a very thought-provoking post about the need for greater disaster preparedness in Cyberspace. He points out the obvious: "There are many, many wonderful things happening, but they are happening — as is the want of the distributed web — everywhere." Information and projects are scattered all over the web, which is great, but how does anybody keep track of it all, find out what's available, and figure out where to go for the information and help they really need?

Of course there are some great efforts to consolidate all of these distributed happenings, including the PeopleFinder project which I've been marginally involved with on the p.r. and mobilization side, and which my colleague Ethan Zuckerman and many other technical geniuses have been working on intensively throughout the Labor Day weekend.

But as Jeff points out, we should take the lessons learned from this experience, plus the Tsunami help efforts, and try to be better prepared in advance for future catastrophes. We need better mechanisms to coordinate online efforts from the start. Once we're all done dealing with the emergency at hand, Jeff suggests a conference or series of meetups - or at very least some serious online conversations. I agree, all these are necessary. 

Many thanks to Jeff also for his praise of Global Voices!  I hope bloggers all over the world will participate in the creation of Recovery 2.0, and help to ensure that solutions are truly global.

Katrina Data Project: spread the word

Help promote the Katrina PeopleFinder Project! (See the previous post for details.)

Please put these promotional buttons on your website or blog by copying and pasting the following HTML code onto your banners or sidebars:

For a larger button like this:

Use this HTML:

<a href="http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderVolunteer"><img src="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/wp-content/katrina.jpg" title="Katrina" alt="Katrina" /></a>

For a smaller button sized to fit easily in your sidebar:

Use this HTML:

<a href="http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderVolunteer"><img alt="katrinadata" src="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/wp-content/katrinadata.jpg" /></a>

Katrina help! Donate time online.

Donated money?

Please donate a little time.

Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.

It's easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form.

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it's almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites - making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

To get started please click here.

The results of your work will be searchable at the Katrina Data Project page.

Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org

Katrina, Katrina...

Must-read: The Interdictor. Down-to-earth, no B.S., no purple prose, no self-promotion, no politics. Just trying to do his job while informing the world of the facts as he sees them. Read his blog if you read no other Katrina-blogger. 

As for politics… it’s time to start acting outside the Democrats vs. Republicans paradigm.

Doc Searls: “This thing is a huge reset button on politics as usual. Along with everything else.”

Time for some real leadership, by people who might actually serve the interests of the majority of people in this country. I’ve always been a Democrat, but I’ve gotta say, certain liberals who are already salivating at the chance to make political hay out of this situation make me just as nauseous as certain Republicans now making excuses for having gotten their priorities wrong.

Thomas Barnett: “The sheer collapse of New Orleans is shaping up to be a significant System Perturbation all its own.”

A “System Pertubation,” says Barnett, is “a change so abrupt that incremental responses are abandoned in favor of radically new approaches.”

As many are pointing out, Katrina has thrown into stark relief the huge and widening gulf of class and race in America: The disconnect between those for whom the system tends to work well enough (or who can opt out and pay for their own private solutions)… and those for whom the system fails a lot of the time and who have no private resources. Maybe this is the event that shocks us into realizing that we need radically new approaches if we’re going to stop the situation from getting even worse.

Barnett hopes that the “upside” of the New Orleans tragedy will be the asking of some tough questions: “how do you make sure the rural and urban poor aren't permanently disconnected from the future by this tragedy? Does the shock allow us to solve old, seemingly intractable situations such as these, or does it simply exacerbate them?”

I hope the shock will indeed jolt us to stop our leaders’ dithering, delusions of grandeur and special-interest pandering and focus on some real, long-term solutions. Solutions that unite all sane and reasonable people who care about building a better America for all Americans… some of whom have tended to vote Democrat and others of whom have tended to vote Republican.

After you donate- put a button on your blog

The good folks at Typepad have put together HTML code so that bloggers can easily stick donation buttons on their sites.

For an animated badge like this:

Here's the code:

<p style="text-align:center"><a href="http://www.redcross.org/"><img alt="Donate to the Red Cross" src="http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/images/badge-rc-anim-125x125.gif" width="125" height="125" /></a></p>

For a static badge like this:

 

Use this code:

<p style="text-align:center"><a href="http://www.redcross.org/"><img alt="Donate to the Red Cross" src="http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/images/badge-rc-static-help-125x125.gif" width="125" height="125" /></a></p>

international blogging for disaster relief day

More blogs about international blogging for disaster relief day.