Submission + - Geek Disaster Volunteers? (floridadisaster.org)
vrimj writes: "Today we just finished pretending a catastrophic hurricane hit Florida. And what became clear was that while there were a few people with technical skills available there was no real way to contact and mobilize the geeks other then the hobbyist radio community. It sometimes self-organizes, but there is not really a structure emergency response people can reach out to.
So I talked to some people from the Red Cross and Salvation Army, they are interested in trying to help reach out. The people at the Florida Emergency Management Center who train people for initial response (wanna know how to mark houses for search and rescue?) and he is willing to try going to some conventions to do training. We have disaster scenarios that could be turned in to RPG adventures.
So where to start and how? Slashdot, if you would like to be available when the shit hits the fan how can you be reached and how can you help?
The Red Cross and Salvation army are good at what they do, do they just need to reach out to the geeks? Are geeks already pretty organized and some minimal contact system should be set up (say to get in touch with sys admins and GMs and the like and give them a way to make requests to the emergency management community) or does there need to be something more complicated to sustain things like training, supporting people on missions, and keeping volunteer information up to date? If so how the heck do you get started?"
So I talked to some people from the Red Cross and Salvation Army, they are interested in trying to help reach out. The people at the Florida Emergency Management Center who train people for initial response (wanna know how to mark houses for search and rescue?) and he is willing to try going to some conventions to do training. We have disaster scenarios that could be turned in to RPG adventures.
So where to start and how? Slashdot, if you would like to be available when the shit hits the fan how can you be reached and how can you help?
The Red Cross and Salvation army are good at what they do, do they just need to reach out to the geeks? Are geeks already pretty organized and some minimal contact system should be set up (say to get in touch with sys admins and GMs and the like and give them a way to make requests to the emergency management community) or does there need to be something more complicated to sustain things like training, supporting people on missions, and keeping volunteer information up to date? If so how the heck do you get started?"
