One More on Katrina--the Emergence of CampusRelief.org

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One More on Katrina--the Emergence of CampusRelief.org

9/14/2005

By Terry Calhoun

A little more than two weeks ago, many of us watched in alarm as the floodwalls in New Orleans breached and it became apparent that Katrina was bringing hurricane disaster on a new scale – especially on a new scale for colleges and universities. Never before had so many institutions been so seriously impacted by a disaster. (Note that I do not call it a ‘natural disaster’ as in fact it was the result of decades and decades of mismanagement of the Gulf environment.

But it seemed that the federal government and even the news media were slow to realize the long-term consequences of the shifting situation: Things were not going to be back to normal soon. So my boss at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), and I came up with a low-tech, short-term method to get higher education connected around this disaster; and I wrote my column that week about the need for higher education to “come up with a plan for an always-on Internet-based resource for assistance to institutions that have met with disasters.”

FEMA has for years pursued a Disaster-Resistant University program that had been previously featured in SCUP programming; but the program had not been aggressive for years and was always underfunded. There was no governmental site for higher education to use. I concluded:

We need a constantly-on higher education disaster communications center with links to knowledge resources, agencies and other institutions that can help, and an active subscriber base using email and postings to share needs and available assistance. The folks in IT are the people with the expertise and resources to build it.

Well, as things shook out, it turns out that plans were quickly underway to create just such a site. The first quality database-driven site up was the one from EDUCAUSE, but it focused solely on IT-related offers or requests for support. SCUP’s own (www.scup.org/knowledge/katrina/) list quickly had more than 1,200 subscribers and lots of offers flying back and forth, but our IT person was away at a FileMaker conference and we had no ability to database the offers and queries.

Sorting through Lyris-based email threads is a painstakingly slow way to find such things, so I developed a simple, hand-coded HTML page with an alphabetical index on the left-hand side which had same-page links to more complete information in the right-hand column or to institutional Katrina sites. As offers came into the list, I updated the web document by hand. I also took offers from the many other lists I am on – quite a few came from UWEBD (University Web Developers) and many from PUBS-L.

As you might have guessed, that sort of killed my weekend. What I had hoped was that the list would be a useful resource, which it was, but I had not anticipated the intensity with which every college and university would want to be sure its offers were on the list. So, I spent the weekend maintaining the page, and I mean all weekend, while fielding calls from university and college presidents and their assistants or public relations people asking that their offer be placed on the list ASAP. [All my phones go to my cell phone, even my office phone for which I no longer have even a handset, so I get work-related calls at the strangest times. The best was when my boss called me at 4 am to leave a message and I shocked her by answering live ?] Luckily, before the weekend started I knew that help was on the way.