(please circulate widely)
Hi everyone,
Many people have been asking me how they can use their Internet skills
to help out with hurricane victims. I've been asking bloggers to blog.
Now I'd like to ask photographers to photograph -- and help reunite
victims with their families.
I'd like to ask anyone of you who are able to go to an evacuation
shelter to go there ASAP and start photographing people with a digital
camera. Collect their name, physical description, names of people they
are trying to reach, their location and contact information. Similarly,
if you're able to get access to a bulletin board of photos of the
missing, photograph them individually and collect whatever data is
available. We should also do the same for online photo collections of
the missing that are scattered around the Internet.
Once you have all of this, upload it to Flickr.com. Flickr is a free
photo sharing tool with very powerful aggregating tools. If you're not a
member, go to the site and you'll have your account set up in just a few
moments.
When you upload photos, you can give them "tags" - keywords associated
with that photo. Tags are very, very powerful tools for pooling photos
together. I've been using them on http://katrina05.blogspot.com to
display photos tagged with words like hurricane and neworleans.
Photos should be tagged one of three ways:
katrinamissing: persons who are missing
katrinafound: persons who were once missing but are now found
katrinaokay: persons who are safe in shelters and are trying to reach
friends and family.
When you post your photos, please include the tag in the title, such as
KatrinaMissing: John Smith
or
KatrinaOkay: Jane Smith
That way, their status and name will appear in the RSS feed's title tag.
Then include all data you have about the person in the description of
the photo. Don't skimp on information - include everything you can.
Once people start posting photos, we'll be able to find them here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/katrinamissing/
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/katrinafound/
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/katrinaokay/
There are also RSS feeds located on each of these pages. We can then use
these RSS feeds to aggregate the collections and distribute them to Red
Cross field offices, the Astrodome (there will be an Internet lab there
soon), etc. I will start aggregating them on
http://katrina05.blogspot.com and will share the javascript so others
can do the same once it's up and running.
So let's get out our cameras and step up to the plate. Let's help in
whatever way we can.
andy
--
-----------------------------------
Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.tsunami-info.org
Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
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