Technola : Public Interest Law & Technology Updates & Commentary : Matthew Burnett & Kate Bladow : Tech Advice for the Non-Profit Legal Sector

After a fairly uneventful hurricane season, Hurricane Ida is headed toward the United States. Ida is expected to land somewhere between Louisiana and Florida as early as Tuesday, and communities in these areas are preparing for the storm.

However, a more dispersed group is also getting ready. Earlier today, Andy Carvin called for online volunteers to help update The Hurricane Information Center, a hurricane information portal that Technola highlighted in 2008. Volunteers are needed to help with several tasks, but Andy says:

Most importantly, we need to update the wiki: http://hurricanewiki.org. We need volunteers to review the wiki section by section and make sure that there are resources collected for Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Much of this was done last year but it can't hurt to be sure it's up to date. If you plan to work on a section of the wiki, please let us know which one.

If you can help, speak up. If you don't have time to help review the wiki, take a few seconds to pass on Andy's request for help. Maybe someone in your network does.

On a related note, anyone looking for disaster legal information should check out Matthew's previous post "Online Disaster Legal Resources." - K

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I came across a couple of tweets that I wanted to share with Technola readers.

The first is from Andy Carvin. He was tweeting from the PublicMediaCamp held recently in DC.

Andy Carvin's Tweet

Although I suspect Andy was referring to natural disasters, what struck me was how true this is for most types of disasters, including funding cuts and bad publicity. When a disaster hits, you need to act quickly. You don't want to spend most of your time figuring out who your supporters are.

The second is from Ashley Schweitzer, which she tweeted from a Social Media Breakfast in Minnesota.

Ashley Schweitzer's tweet

Yes, we are all trying to keep the lights on today, but social networking should be seen as an investment. You won't get a giant payback immediately. You need to commit to it and use it to connect with other people. It's from the relationships that you build that good and often unexpected opportunities come your way. - K

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I miss the days when I could yell down the hall and check to see if my "Internet problem" was everyone elses' problem, too. Now that I work from home, I have to do a lot more checking to see if the problem is my computer, my network, or some bigger issue that I have little control over. To troubleshoot these problems, I have my own set of steps that I walk through, but I haven't had a good way to check the Internet's overall health.

However, last week, thanks to Andy Carvin, I found a new tool to do just that: Internet Health Report. Using this site, you can monitor the availability and latency of the major Tier One carriers. Granted, it's not going to help if you can't connect to the Internet at all, but it will give you a better idea of whether your network is just being pokey or if the Internet is slow in general. - K

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If anyone is interested in or needs assistance with hurricane-related issues, they should check out The Hurricane Information Center. Put together by Andy Carvin from National Public Radio and a mess of people that he convinced to help, this website is a portal for all of the information that is flying around about this year's hurricanes. More information about this site is available here on the FastCompany site and here on the NPR site. And as Matthew mentioned last week, free legal assistance is being offered by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. You can stay up-to-date with their efforts either through their blog or by following them on Twitter. - K

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