interesting way to help Haiti families reconnect

[shireen]

I just found this
Help find missing persons with @extraordinaries! http://beextra.org/haiti
http://www.theextraordinaries.org/2010/01/haiti-quake-you-can-help.html

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti, killing possibly thousands and leaving the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince in ruins. The damage this disaster has caused is still unmeasurable as friends and families around the globe try to contact loved ones while thousands of others continue searching for ways to help.

The Extraordinaries have created a support page to harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time.

Via http://beextra.org/haiti, people can upload information about their loved ones or sort through news photos to help identify missing persons. Our team is working around the clock to build a facial recognition matching system that will allow the crowd to match photos of the missing with photos coming in from the ground in Haiti.

In just a few spare moments of time, people around the globe can reach out to those affected by the quake and help reconnect the missing with their families and friends!


After Katrina, I was one of a few hundred volunteers helping to reunite lost pets with their families. This group pretty much self-organized over the internet; people identified areas needing work, started coordinating with each other, and just did what had to be done. It was grassroots volunteering at its best.


I was wondering if there was anything similar going on with Haiti, to help reunite family members with each other. And sure enough, this very interesting site popped up in google. They are using volunteers to tag photos with identifying characteristics of people in it, so that people searching for family members can use it as filters in their searches. I just did a couple of photos to see how it worked, and it's promising.

Give it a try. And please provide suggestions on how the rest of us can use the tools most effectively.


If you find other similar efforts underway, please post about it. The more volunteers working these different grassroots efforts, the more information is provided for families looking for missing members.

[Electric Monk]

1. Not to hijack your thread (k&r) but have you seen the 2009 movie Mine?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326247/

It's about reuniting pets with their people after Katrina. Very touching, imho.

[shireen]

2. no .... not sure i could watch it

the memories from that time are too painful.

This photo tagging thing is pretty cool -- i think it will be helpful. Anyone reading this thread, please give it a try.

[shireen]

3. dupe, delete

[shireen]

4. self-kick

[mnhtnbb]

5. CNN is running a site to search/reconnect with family/friends in Haiti

http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=381628&hpt=T1


It can be accessed from the home page of CNN by looking on the left and clicking

# Seeking the missing | I'm alive! | Victims