Hello, there are several efforts ongoing to provide technical assistance to the Relief Effort.  For a general overview, read David Geilhufe blog here: http://blog.social-source.com

We have created a Katrina development list which you can subscribe to if you are reading this from a forwarded email: katrinadev-subscribe@civicspacelabs.org

I see several efforts going on.  Let me list them in order of priority as I understand them and then you all can correct me.

1)schema/dictionary for missing person data.  http://zesty.ca/katrina/- Lead Ping Yee and Jon Plax

2)Get an RSS standard. http://www.afallstardjs.com/test.xml -Jon Plax

3)Identify data sources: http://del.icio.us/tag/peoplefinder.  Volunteers needed to move this list: http://neworleansnetwork.org/node/22 to the peoplefinder tag.  John Lebowsky and Ethan Zuckerman. 

4)We need data: David NewBerger:thegeekguy@gmail.com and Tony Chang: tony@ponderer.org are working on crawlers.  Crawlers should post their efforts here:  http://www.omidyar.net/group/katrinarefugee/news/2/

5)Accomodation matcher.  Michael Haggerty is coding away on modifying event finder to help.  I have posted a accommodation spec here: http://neworleansnetwork.org/node/29

6)Remotely acquired data can be posted over HTTP POST to the New Orleans Network CiviCRM contact database. Dave Greenberg.  http://neworleansnetwork.org/node/30

7)http://neworleansnetwork.org a Drupal/CivicSpace site with CiviCRM customized as a people finder application.

8)Chris Holland and Josh Kleinpeter are looking for a dedicated crawler that they can point at a list of people sites.  If you have a search appliance you can donate some cycles to please contact them.

If you can please post to the katrinadev list and let us know what you can do.

Cheers,

Kieran