Newswise — A Web site that provides a comprehensive search function to find housing for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina has been launched by the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
The site, http://www.katrinahousing.net, will list about 375,000 beds in all 50 states, making it the single largest known list of homes for hurricane evacuees.
The site aggregates housing offers from a variety of Internet sites, greatly streamlining the effort of facilitating matches between those seeking housing and those offering it. A robust searching capability on Katrinahousing.net makes it possible to look for housing on a state and community basis. The site identifies the number of units available in each community and provides a means to contact those who are making the offer.
The site also offers links to organizations that are compiling offers of housing, so people who have housing to offer can go to Katrinahousing.net and find a list of placement organizations and Web sites to post offers.
The site is the work of at least 55 School of Information volunteers who have logged nearly 1,000 hours to create the site since the first call for help went out Sept. 1. The volunteers use e-mail, cell phones, teleconferencing, instant messaging, a wiki and other collaboration technologies to coordinate their work. Face to face meetings rarely involve more than five to 10 people in this spontaneous and loosely coupled effort. "The site will remain useful as long as people need temporary or semi-permanent housing," said Margaret Hedstrom, a SI faculty member, "so we expect our cadre of volunteers to grow."
The site is intended to give relief workers the ability to match groups of Katrina victims with communities that can offer housing and appropriate services. In addition, individuals may use the Web site to seek out their own housing. Communities will also be able to learn who else is offering housing so that volunteers can better coordinate efforts locally.
WHY KATRINAHOUSING.NET
Finding enough offers for housing may not be as difficult as the job of matching people in need with people who have housing to offer. Thousands of Americans across the country are offering spare rooms, motor homes and empty apartments to tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims. However, very few displaced people have access to the Internet. Meanwhile, relief organizations using the Web to locate temporary shelter must sort through hundreds of Web sites and thousands of postings offering assistance in towns and cities scattered across the United States.
WHO'S BEHIND KATRINAHOUSING.NET
Students, faculty and alumni at the U-M School of Information are using multi-disciplinary expertise to deploy information communication technologies. The school expects those seeking both short-term and long-term temporary housing to use its newly created data aggregation, matching and search service to locate available housing in communities that can meet their needs. Katrainahousing.net uses automated tools to find as many housing offers as possible and relies on volunteers to review and annotate new postings. The school's mission: "Connecting people, information and technology in more meaningful ways."
For more information, visit: http://www.katrinahousing.nethttp://www.si.umich.eduhttp://www.umich.eduhttp://projects.si.umich.edu/CIC
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