bkdelong

ETA 2: Sunday, 11am ET - Updated post with User Manual for this Project.

ETA: Now working with Andy Carvin/acarvin of http://gustav08.ning.com. Need far more staff, managers and transcribers. Wrote draft Interdictor Standard Operating Procedures for the project that need input but give idea of what's going on.

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Those of you who have known me a while, know that while I was between jobs when Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, I got sucked into a fascinating project that was pulling data straight from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas and redistributing it to the masses. This all-consuming 24/7 effort led to be volunteering with the Red Cross, getting my Ham Radio license and quite a bit of Disaster Services volunteer training.

Well, in about 24 hours Gustav went from being upgrade TO Hurricane status and at the NHC 2pm update was just announced as moving to Category 4 status and predicting Category 5 stage by tonight.

The project was called Interdictor, named after interdictor who was stuck in DirectNIC's NOLA before, during and after Katrina tasked with the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery efforts.

When all forms of communication went down, folks in outlying states started livestreaming scanners and a whole slew of volunteers started transcribing them in #interdictor on irc.freenode.net (eventually moved to several different #interdictor-scannerN channels with N being a numerical value) and created a full-fledged operation posting the logs to the Web. People also monitored articles, reports and blogs throughout the Web and the channels became a location to disseminate such info.

I didn't really do anything for 2006 or 2007 but something seems...different about Gustav. So I decided to see if I could start the project back up.

So...it's going. I won't have even remotely the time I had to devote to it last time due to work and parent/family duties but I wanted to devote the time I could.

The Meme part of this? Please spread the word.

We have the following resources going:

• #interdictor, irc.freenode.net


• @interdictor on Twitter


• #Gustav on Twitter


• Scanner Frequencies at http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Hurricane_Gustav (an attempt to spinoff the original, well-done Katrina page)


• Interdictor-Gustav Flickr Group


• Interdictor Project YouTube Channel


I foresee the following needs:

- People with scanners they have the systems and bandwidth to livestream
- Folks sharp re: IRC who can pull in an eggdrop/TCL bot (Maybe ChumpBot?) to log, aggregate RSS feeds and post to the Web.
- Someone to make sure to reach the Twitter folks to let them know things may get traffic-heavy with Gustav.
- People to join #interdictor on IRC and transcribe, post news articles and help out
- Folks who are good at coordinating, organizing, managing and leading to join #interdictor and keep the project running smoothly in a timely manner while managing a disparate and ever-changing, often asynchronous volunteer staff
- Folks who can create backups of the logs or come up with additional social media project ideas

Any other ideas?

Pass it on!