I was going to write about how you can help out victims of Katrina by volunteering your time to enter data into the People Finder database, but I see that they are down for the moment:
Friends –
Thanks to everyone’s generosity and goodness of spirit, we’ve managed to reduce the machine running the NON database to a pile of smoking rubble. There’s a team now working on moving the database to a more robust server. In the meantime, it’s not possible to add entries to the database.
It would be great if you would either check in with this wiki tomorrow AM, or send an email to [email protected] to subscribe to a list which will send you an email when the database is ready again.
Thanks everyone for your contributions. It’s been amazing to watch folks come online, pitch in… and inadvertently melt down this server.
(All the data we entered is fine — don’t worry.) EthanZ 17:23, 4 Sep 2005 (EDT)
And yes, that is the tag of Ethan Zuckerman, whose written more about the project on his blog.
This seems like a way that all of us can do something useful!
UPDATE: They are back up. Go help!
