Lisa Stansky, New Orleans Legal Assistance
When it comes to using technology to rebuild New Orleans, sometimes less is more. That certainly seemed true immediately after the storm, when there was no power, few or no land lines, and little or no cellular phone service across a swath of the gulf region. Basic communication tools, when they worked, became lifelines, sometimes literally.
What happened? People took baby steps. But the truly remarkable thing, observers note, is that those who were low-tech or no-tech quickly got with the program. Average cell phone users learned how to text. People who never touched a computer keyboard quickly picked up the basics of e-mail communication and online research.
“In that first month or so, the Internet was about the only thing that worked,” said Christopher Broussard, IT director with the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, or LANO. “If it wasn’t e-mail, you weren’t communicating.”
The power of the text message appeared. “When you’ve been run out of your city on a day’s notice, you can’t bring your internet connection with you. You bring your phone,” Broussard said.
Perhaps the lesson learned for the technology community from the terrible days following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is that tools should serve a wide variety of users across the skills continuum.
That was the gist behind www.LouisianaREBUILDS.info, which compiles information about a host of recovery sources in one place where it is easily accessed by those looking to put their lives back together in New Orleans.
The very flexibility of LouisianaRebuilds.info is why it got off the ground, according to Christopher Reade, managing partner with Carrollton Technology Partners in New Orleans. “Had it not been amorphous it would not have happened,” said Reade, who explained the site required cooperation from a host of government entities and other partners, with minimal fuss because of the urgency of the task at hand.
Lessons learned? “You can’t have the organizations involved have their egos involved,” said Reade. Government allowed the private sector to get the site up and running.
Southeast Louisiana Legal Assistance marshaled its attorneys and staff by using its program site as a networking hub to broadcast information about getting in touch with colleagues, said Rowena Jones, the program’s statewide website coordinator at the time of the disaster. To get out information about post-disaster resources and issues, advocates also turned to Louisiana’s site within the national LawHelp network (www.lawhelp.org/la), which offers free legal information for low-income people. And the Internet still remains a portal for channeling resources to the stricken region, including volunteers.
Broussard noted that LANO provides disaster training, which includes encouraging organizations to set up an online presence as a communication hub during and after a disaster. “Mass communication is where the Internet obviously shines,” Broussard said. Nonprofits are becoming savvy to a range of ideas, from establishing a virtual workspace accessible from a remote server to using existing online sites, like craigslist.