All,

Sometimes it takes a bit for ideas that get to swirling around in your head to jell into something useful. Yesterday morning, around 7:45 am, as I was about to log on to our company's VPN to begin my work day, some stuff that had been accumulating in my head somehow came together, and I had a BFO***

(***BFO: Blinding Flash of the Obvious)

The ideas consisted of:
-- My very rudimentary, but growing, knowledge of DNN and its stability
-- An idea that a friend germinated out of some help our family has been receiving from small fellowships of our church denomination all over east Texas. That idea was to create a "network" to help coordinate helping each other. His idea revolved around a way to organize the people (who mostly meet in small congregations and home fellowships), my addition to it was the concept for a website to help the people coordinate. Thus was born the parent website that furnished a platform for my BFO
-- RITA -- that not so lovely meter maid heading towards the Texas/Louisana coastline. (Beatles fans will recognize the meter maid allusion)
-- Our denomination has a lot of small fellowships in that area too, and north east texas would represent a prime destination for people wanting to evacuate from the south. Plus, a lot of the people and groups in these areas are familiar with each other, and often as good friends. This is very important for something like my BFO to be workable.
-- All hotels, motels, shelters, rest areas -- anyplace someone might go to ride out something like Rita is full beyond capacity. We have four nice size shelters here in Tyler alone, but they're full to overflowing.
-- That leaves private homes. I know that many, probably most of you who read this would be willing to give someone a short-term place to stay if they were fleeing something like these hurricanes that have hit us so hard this year. But as Katrina showed, this is something where you have to be very, very careful. In fact, the Red Cross (I think) was warning people about not taking in Katrina evacuees unless they were personally known to you.
-- What was needed was a way to hook up people who we could verify to each other. "so and so is known to me to be a person in good standing with fellowship xyz". This idea would never work for a big organization or bureaucracy where everybody is a stranger. But a close-knit situation, like a church denomination where the fellowships tend to have lots of people who know people in other fellowships? That would be perfect.

Enter DNN.  As I said, the idea hit me at 7:45 or so yesterday morning. By 9, I had the page I'll link below up, running and tested. I spent the next hour on the phone and hitting internet forums I knew to try to get the word out, then had to earn my employer's dime for few hours. Yesterday afternoon I created a page, and security role, in under an hour using the contact lists, so that I can create lists of people who "Have Space" or "Need Space", and then give a few selected people who have good knowledge of our fellowships and are discrete and discerning enough to be trusted who can use the lists to help people with needs and those with space get in touch with each other. 

So, that's the idea. The page is here: http://www.netsnet.org/RITA/tabid/56/Default.aspx  PLEASE DO NOT REGISTER UNLESS YOU HAVE A NEED OR CAN HELP AND CAN PROVIDE SOME VERIFICATION OF WHO YOU ARE!!! I'm sorry to be so fussy, but I hope you can understand where I'm coming from here. Katrina was a wakeup call in more ways than just hurricanes.

YOU CAN LOG IN AS THIS USER: userID: aspnet  pw: test

This will show you what a registered user will see. I'm sorry, but due to confidentiality, I can't give you access to the page where we're tracking people who respond. It is nothing but a couple of side-by-side, standard DNN Contact lists that parallel the "Feedback" forms on the main page.

So far we have a number of people from north Texas--Dallas to Longview, Texarkana, even up in Kansas City, who have space, but because I had this idea so late in the game, it appears it was too late and those who would have needed space were already on the road and thus wouldn't have been aware of this. So much for this time, but next time we'll be sure people know about this in advance.

This page was so simple to create. I'm still a fumbling noob at DNN, but it only took me an hour to put together and test the opening page. The contact list page took even less. The idea is rough, and I've already thought of a dozen improvements, and that's without the seed ideas that will come after this settles down and other people start making suggestions.

I think this is something that any similar group could use in any area where there is the potential for people having to "get out of Dodge" and go looking for a short-term place to stay. I think it will have to be a group such as ours, where people are known to each other, or can easily find out about people. That's where we have the advantage over the big bureaucracies. Let them focus on their convoys of trucks and huge shelters. Let us offload them somewhat by getting our people into private residences, thus leaving room in the shelters and hotels for the more needy people.

We probably won't help anyone with this one, but wait till next time. DNN may play a key role the next time some sort of disaster pushes a lot of people out of their homes and looking for shelter.

Check out http://www.deopolis.com/katrina for a similar concept.  It's based on the core forum.

grandOPUS wrote:

Check out http://www.deopolis.com/katrina for a similar concept.  It's based on the core forum.

Love the name.  Great job.

Now to get ready to "nuke" the next disaster even faster and better. No single effort can do it all, but each little bit adds up to a lot.

Kudos to both of you John and Jim. Glad to see DNN being used for good and not evil.

Now to get ready to "nuke" the next disaster even faster and better. No single effort can do it all, but each little bit adds up to a lot.

With the rate you guys are welcoming these storms: maybe an idea to include 'disaster site' as a portal template for next release of DNN.

On a more serious note: it would be great if some of you guys running DNN disaster sites would bundle and share the experience so that a good disaster template/manual could be made.

Peter

Jim, I was pleased to see that you jumped in to help by harnessing DNN.  We've been donating our listserv capability to a number of nonprofit agencies to assist in coordinating relief efforts for Katrina and now Rita. 

I have had the same thought re DNN.  We're in the process of migrating our site, CharityChannel.com, over to DNN for two reasons.  First, I think it has an incredibly bright future and it's matured to the point where I think it will server our 120,000 nonprofit/voluntary organization professionals well.  Second, we'd like to be able to instantly create portals for exactly the same reasons you posted.  I was quite pleased to have read about your project!  Keep up the good work.

Steve