Alan Gutierrez

On this day, I’m not much into reflecting. I don’t feel that there has been a pause since I arrived. I don’t know why I’d pause now, in the midst of the 2006 hurricane season.

I’m reading Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure or Homeland Security. I’ve read it all day yesterday, and I’ll finish it shortly. It is the first accounting of the Hurricane that I have read. I know now that much of the flooding came from the collapse of the flood walls on the canals.

Reading this book also explains whey Ashley is so adamant that the floodwalls were destoryed in a terrorist attack. In Disaster authors Christopher Cooper and Robert Block describe a brand new Department of Homeland Security that has taken control of FEMA, and taxed it’s natural disaster response resources to fund preparation for further terrorist attacks.

The DHS did not recognize that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a historic disaster, and did not respond with the fury that was required. We are fortunate to have our neighbor Texas, which dispatched more resources to Louisiana than FEMA, which was absent three days after the storm. We are fortunate for the intervention of Wal-Mart, which brought necessities to the National Guard at the Convention Center, when FEMA could not.

Upon reading Disaster, I feel that Michael Brown is a perfect scapegoat.

I went to the communications and outreach meeting that Concordia held. It was disturbing.

We are shortly approaching the anniversary of the flood. In the meeting, we were asked to brainstorm on ideas outreach. Let’s define the problem, and start spit-balling. This is where the frustration the neighborhoods felt, is felt by me. You cannot tell me that we need to start with a blank sheet of paper. Bettie Hill was literally writing “Phone Banking” on a blank sheet of paper on an easel.

WWL-TV was there. Not to brainstorm, sadly. They were there to film the event for the evening news. The correspondent had to explain to Stephen Bingler, that there were ethical boundaries that prevented WWL from participating, now that they had been invited to cover the meeting, rather than contribute to it. Despite the fact that she wishes she could, she would have to be invited, and no, it was too late to change.

That was a glaring failure on the part of this krewe. It was a stunning admission.
It is now obvious that television to them means publicity for Concordia, and not outreach. Had they been in touch at all with local television during the UNOP carnival?

Concordia did not want television at the UNOP meetings. Concordia wants to control the process, as if it were a product launch.

Which it may well be.

The meeting was another display of the Concordia’s “Gosh, this is hard,” fig leaf. They have no idea what they are doing, and they have no shame in displaying their ignorance, despite the handsome sum they are being paid for their guidance in the process. Yet they have no guidance to offer. They best they can do, is beg for answers at every turn. They love to remind us that this is a unique catastrophe, and to our criticisms, they respond, well can you suggest anything better?

The answer to this tidbit of rhetoric, is always yes, but it’s too late by then. Without the easel with the big sheets of paper, how can they capture your idea? Gosh, this is hard.

That was the case with my recent article, For the Record, This Is Not An Election. In it, I offered a viable solution for voting. One that deserves a follow up. There are may viable solutions on offer over at Think New Orleans. Myself and other volunteers are following up on these daily.

There an an old software industry trick. It’s called Vaporware. Tell your use based something new and better is coming, gather user feedback, have press conferences, and while they wait they’ll make do with what we’ve got for them already.

By promising answers and not delivering, this process obstructs progress, it makes us wait until the official communications and outreach plan is released, doing without. Suffering.

The Unified New Orleans Plan web site. Click on any page and you will see the front page. People are flustered by this. There is no there there. It’s day 329. Well, it’s not the only web site that is empty around these parts.

I’m pleased, actually. They got one thing big thing right.

I’m pleased to see that the content of the UNOP will be released under the Creative Commons. There is a link to the Creative Commons license they chose. This is the only web site in New Orleans that I know of that has made this decision. The Creative Commons license tells you exactly how you can share the information.

We get a lot of email from lawyers, to our mailing lists, with stupid email disclaimers. They think they are sharing information? These disclaimers do not apply to me, of course, because I have my own disclaimer.

What ever they post at UNOP, it will be more accessible than anything posted almost anywhere else in New Orleans civic web sites.

We are standing in line for $40-90 billion. We can’t get the $40-90 billion until we have a plan. That plan depends on neighborhood control of the planning process. Basically, the money waits until we have some idea of how it will be spent. Karen Gadbois said yesterday, this money has come to the city on the backs of people who have lost their homes, which sums it nicely. I ask you to help me wrap my head around this planning process, where it’s at, what it means, and alert me to the many ways in which I’ll be relieved of the burden of self-determination by those that are old hands at spending money that begins with a ‘B’.

Back in ‘69, ‘70, the Internet ment something. Those days are gone, baby.

It was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust.

Why didn’t we change the MX records on edu domains? Store that email somewhere outside of New Orleans, let people keep their accounts. Why did webmail bounce? Couldn’t we have dropped quotas for people with Gulf Coast zip codes?

Recovery 2.0 the most thinly veiled agenda I’ve ever seen. Now that people are scattered and their networks destroyed, let’s see if they’ll migrate. Let’s talk about how, in our Web 2.0 fantasies, Ajax and Atom organize people without phone lines.

The Web 2.0 crowd needs to temper their enthusiasm for their untested web based vision, and reocognize that, New Orleans especially, needs practical information technology.

The real hero of Katrina was NOLA.com and the NOLA.com forums. Written in 1998. Never updated. Ineffective search. Limited archives.

Killer interface, though. A box for a message and a button to send.

It is simple. It works.

It is here now.

Web 2.0 papware is for generating content, not generating action. It is for organizing dates, not organizing cities.

It is horrible in crisis. Email is vastly superior. We should have thrown our weight behind email.

The Web 2.0 crowd needs to understand that people facing death, homelessness, and impovershment are not good beta testers.

I’ve been invited by Phil Gerbyshak to going the 100 bloggers project. I’m going to use that platform to draw attention to Think New Orleans.

Think New Orleans is on a mission to remove barriers that prevent civic information from getting out into the real deal web.

Civic groups in New Orleans have a bad habit of using chain e-mail messages. When they do use the web, a lot of information is posted to forums that are frame based and cannot be indexed by Google, or on static web sites where information is moved or deleted.

There are only a handful of forums that have syndicated feeds.

How does Think New Orleans address this? By setting folks up with blogs, or by posting their information to the Think New Orleans group blog.

The Think New Orleans blog itself hosts digitially recorded audio of community meetings. It’s a way to extend the civic discussion and to maintain a record of what’s been discussed.

In any medium, I’ll be banging on about this.

Hugh MacLeod on Business Porn

Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it’s about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.

How many times have you seen a reporter say, “Shirley Tibedeaux, you’ve lost your home and you now have no health insurance. How do you feel?”

[response]

“There you have it, Jim. Now back to you.”

The term disaster porn coined by my friend Christian Roselund to describe Katrina journalism.

Like Hugh’s concept, except that it appeals to us in a way that is perfectly purient.

Rather than helping victims or understanding the complexity, we’re invited to share their emotions, from the comfort of our homes, feel their pain, and having done our part stay tuned for the sports roundup.

Yup. Ray Nagin was at the last 9th Ward Homeowners Association meeting. We recorded his message online. If you want to hear Ray Nagin speaking clearly to his constituents, go listen to his statement.

I really enjoyed listening to him speak. He’s a plain dealer. It was business communication, and full of information and opinion.

• Ray Nagin at the 9th Ward Homeowner’s Association

Rather than comment here, please leave your comments in the Think New Orleans post for the audio, 9th Ward Homeowners: Guest Mayor Ray Nagin.

The quality of information that comes out of the 9th Ward Homeowner’s Meeting is amazing, by the way. It is a very well moderated, and open community forum.