Techie Hackers vs Project Management

What a day. I had a temper tantrum of sorts working with the #interdictor crew today. We simply don't have enough consistent resources to handle transcribing and summarizing as well as project management. Since the latter is being ignored, the effort is in chaos. Transcribers and Ops Managers come and go - the latter not recognizing those from previous days or different timezones. Ops Managers on one shift are changing the organization of channels and creating new ones so the rest of us "vets" have no clue what is going on. It's ridiculous.

There's a lot of tech geniuses out there but, man, if they only understood the concept of organization and project management we'd be one hell of a society. We need more friggen iNtuitive people out there who understands tech, can figure out these STP's thought processes and get things done.

Just leave the processes running as-is and work on a plan behind the scenes. An all-emcompassing plan that can be presented with gradual transition points. Not implementing bits here and bits there without knowing the rest of the plan.

It's the same in a lot of the spaces I'm in - Web standards, Semantic Web, RDF, FOAF, the hacker community. They have all these grand ideas but they can't organize to implement a sustainable project that will reach fruition and eventually autonomy. *sigh*

The good news is there is some movement in SemWeb stuff for disasters - PFIF or People Finder Interchange Format. The key from here as they continue development is to get buy-in from the various UN IDP programs, Relief NGOs and the Red Cross technical folk. They also need some basic working implementations with sample data sets. I'd use data from Sudan (Darfur crisis), Sri Lanka, (Tsumani), and NOLA, (Katrina). Finally, I'd even see what is used to currently markup various refugee and IDP-related information and perhaps work on a handful of XSLTs. And those are just first steps.

Red Cross Update - Going Tomorrow Early AM

Just got a call from the American Red Cross last night - training is cancelled. But that's because we're meeting there at 6am tomorrow morning to head to Otis Air National Guard Base where, I presume, we are either preparing for evacuees or they're already headed up. I will have more information in the AM prior to leaving.

I'm not sure how long I will be there - I was planning on going to NOLA for 2 weeks so just in case, I'm packing clothes and toiletries as I'll be driving there. Something tells me, I want to be prepared to stay if they need me. And more often than not in volunteer situations and event organizing I make myself indispensible in that fashion.

Kirky (kiekre) is on AIM during her workday and I will have my cell on me - +1.617.797.8471. I will leave my laptop behind logged into IM in case people want to leave messages. Kirky will be checking them while I am gone.

I'll try to record my experiences when I can and will eventually blog them here. Will miss you all.