NOLAmap

From Networked Advocacy

Open Source Organizing

Quintus Jett is a visiting professor at the Dartmouth University Thayer School of Engineering. Not the first place you would look for an organizational behavior class.

But his ideas for organizing groups of people come straight from the method used in open-source programming.

Rebuilding(whether in New Orleans or any other disaster zone) moves faster when the community is able to determine accurate needs and attract necessary assistance. This kind of information can’t come from the government. Instead it comes from the local citizens and on-the-ground workers.

And so that’s where Jett went.

Jett has brought scores of volunteers from several institutions to come with him to New Orleans to map neighborhoods. Student volunteers survey the areas and color-code houses according to their state of repair. The information will give a clear assessment of what still needs to be repaired, and will make it easier to ask for funding from the federal government.

Jett’s research combines organizational science and digital technologies to create a model that allows for “open” participation in disaster recovery. The students were joined by other ad-hoc volunteers and together they mapped over 14,000 addresses in just 10 days. That data had been added to an interactive online map, and can be used by anyone else trying to allocate resources or mobilize volunteers.

One of the student volunteers, Rashmi Agarwal said the information they collected is a big piece of the rebuilding puzzle, “While we were working, we met someone who needed their house gutted, and we connected that person to a group that could help. Since the mapping data is being put online, the information gets to neighborhood presidents and gives them a sense of the progress.”

To see the map for yourself, and to learn about the project, visit the Gentilly Neighborhood Mapping Center

To listen to a podcast of Quintus Jett speaking about “open-source organizing,” visit Views From the Green