How social networking saved New Orleans

If there is any doubt to the power of social media, social networking and social software, then nonbelievers may need to Think New Orleans.

In a powerful presentation on the marriage of software tools and crowds of people in desperate need of organization around a cause, Alan Gutierrez of the nonprofit group Think New Orleans detailed an inspiring post-Hurricane Katrina story of how a crash course in social networking helped people emerge from the rubble; find their voice; fight the government; solicit help; and save their neighborhoods, schools and each other.

At the annual Burton Group conference, Gutierrez, a self-described underemployed programmer looking to lend his considerable talent to nonprofit causes, told a story he entitled “Innovating Your Way Out of Total System Failure” to highlight how residents in a handful of the hardest-hit neighborhoods used ingenuity, creativity, digital cameras, Flickr, WordPress, Google Maps and Yahoo Groups to bend rebuilding efforts to the will of the people and away from the wrecking balls swung by city government.

"We had to find a way to divide and conquer," Gutierrez says. "Citizens became our knowledge workers. We were able to collect experts and to use their viewpoint as a home owner to help do the job that the government was supposed to do. People reached out to these tools because they were compelled to."

Using blogs with names like Fix the Pumps and Squandered Heritage, residents took up "beats," lending their professional expertise, ingenuity and gumshoe efforts to create a citizens’ voice to counter city government rhetoric. (Read about IT lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina.)

Gutierrez’s beat was an effort called Internet Workshops, where classes with titles such as Web Publishing 101 showed citizens how they could blog, upload files, work with photos and images, create mashups, and most importantly tap the power of organization using the Internet as a hub.

Of note was Matt McBride, a civil engineer who began blogging about and photographing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to repair drainage pumps and install new floodgate pumps in New Orleans. His Fix the Pumps blogs became a watchdog uncovering shoddy work and other issues. (See other stories involving rebuilding New Orleans.)

There was also Karen Gadbois, who collected addresses and used Google Maps on her Squandered Heritage beat to plot undamaged houses that had been slated for demolition to show how they mysteriously were in a neat row along a single street. The city had deemed the houses, some that had been repaired by owners then stealthily torn down by the city, as "eminent health risks." Gadbois detailed how FEMA had given the city money to demolish thousands of homes and used the maps to raise questions about city motives. The result was a federal class action lawsuit.

"All this allowed us to do something," Gutierrez says. "Like the notion of next action, for us it was the next question. Now that we had the questions, any one of us could go to the city meetings and ask about this."