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FamilyMessages.Org started within 48 hours of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina on the Louisiana Coast. The basic structure and functionality of the website was written from scratch in just under 24 hours and ran for two weeks, collecting over 22,000 records of missing families and loved ones. Within that same two week period, there were over one million hits on the website from over 10,000 locations all across the world as survivors slowly reconnected and reunited with family and loved ones. Critical to the operation and overall success of the site were the numerous volunteers at Red Cross centers and other shelters across the nation, the server and bandwidth support from Yahoo, Inc. (Jeremy Johnstone, Meg Garlinghouse, etc.) and countless hours of work from the many volunteers on the Wiki pages, especially Alan Gueterizes during those first early hours.

This page documents the design, development and dpeloyment of FamilyMessages.Org during the two weeks immediately following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Tuesday, August 30

Initial interface concept designed and coded. Includes: Cards for Families Seeking Individuals Quick and Advanced Search funcitonality of cards. RSS Feeds for cards Wednesday, August 31 Site functionality and design released to the General Public via http://katrina.jinkle.com.
Site includes Quick and Advanced search functionality for information in cards.

1:16 AM - From an email describing the basic website:

...one designed to help friends and family find/leave messages for their family members lost during Hurricane Katrina. I don't know if such a site already exists, I've looked and don't really see anything just yet.
Having watched the news coverage tonight and feeling fairly helpless, I sat down and wrote the website (http://katrina.jinkle.com) that has the basic structure for family to post the person's name, a message and a phone number for them to call if they can. It also allows for updating the comments on a person's name, with the idea that other family members can also stay updated.

Obviously, the states and relief agencies are working on the basics of shelter, safety, etc. But the families of those lost in the storm (I am really trying to avoid using the word victim, word-smithing is welcome here) need some way to reach out and communicate. People are calling into Larry King Live asking for help -- clearly this is an area that needs some attention and, being far removed as we are here in Silicon Valley, maybe this is something we can do to help.

12:30 PM - The domain name familymessages.org is secured.

2:45 PM - First email feedback from site received.

6:00 PM - Site moved to new domain name, www.familymessages.org is online.

11:00 PM - Total of XXX cards across X states with 1,479 hits from 6pm to Midnight PT.

Thursday, September 1

9:00 AM - Contacted by Alan Guiterrez coordinating efforts for Wiki for Katrina. Alan asks if the site is likely to scale well, since most of the other sites appear to be forum- or message-posting systems more than database-drive searchable directories.

Innocently, the programmer says yes.

10:00 AM - By word of mouth alone, there have been 11,500 hits resulting in 88 entries across 3 states. The entries are called "MessageBoxes" at the time. (Alan would later suggest referring to them as cards, which was far more intuitive and quickly adopted.)

The first email-based submission is received and posted. Two hours later, four more email requests will have been posted and the total number of entries will have doubled to 180 across 5 states with 14,573 hits.

5:40 PM - First entries with typos submitted, interface improved and support email address setup.

Hit count: 20,494 resulting in 288 entries from 5 states.

8:36 PM - The first "found" record is submitted for someone lost in the French Quarter.

Hit count: 24,792 resulting in 380 entries from 5 states.

10:00 PM - "Quick search" added to the top of the menu bar to support last name and cityname searches, in supoprt of the The site is listed on Craigs List.

12:00 AM - End of day 1 statistics .... Found: 7 Survivors: 7 Entries: 477 Hits: 29,404

Friday, September 2

7:00 AM - First "survivor" email is submitted, site redesigned to support survivor registration.

10:00 AM - First data scraper passes through site, inadvertantly requesting several hundred records be marked as "found". Site's robot.txt file is changed to block scrapers and a request is received within 12 hours to turn it back on. This is the first indication of a cumulative data collection effort. (The robots.txt file was reconstructed and within 1 hour of that change, a followup message ss received thanking us for the change. Clearly, there is more scrutiny than expected.

Anonymous volunteer manually posts the "survivor" list from CNN's website. 11:00 AM - Main page re-designed to consolidate growing number of cards to show most current with link to all. Developed interface for volunteer staff to upload data collected at shelters. Contacted by NOLA to coordinate integration of RSS feeds to cards on site. Total of 1,249 postings across 6 states and 75,533 hits. 12:00 PM - Middle of day 2 statistics .... Found: 13 Survivors: 76 Entries: 743 Hits: 49,773

2:00 PM - State-by-state RSS feeds added, individual RSS feeds updated to include found/survivor status

5:00 PM - Zack Rosen from civicspacelabs.org emails a request to work on a merged database system.

5:30 PM - A Friend on the ground enters Reliant Stadium and shows site to volunteers there. Volunteers start to use the site to help people report their status and find others in the Astrodome as well.

6:00 PM - Evening Day 2 statistics .... Found: 20 Survivors: 442 Entries: 1,202 Hits: 70,021
12:00 AM - End of day 2 statistics .... Found: 33 Survivors: 463 Entries: 1,304 Hits: 79,196

Saturday, September 3

8:00 AM - Added "Good news" link displaying most recently "found" entries and comments.

12:00 PM - Site added to NOLA.com. Site added to main Yahoo! Katrina News search engine page. Yahoo! provides a dedicated spider 24/7 to search and update site for Yahoo! Katrina Main News Page. 3:50 PM - Site breaks 2,000 entries and 100,000 hits, with entries from 6 states. Four hours later, the entries have doubled to 4,008 and 118,225 hits.

7:00 PM - Coding for a "multiple site search" delayed due to increasing hitcounts and emailed submissions.

12:00 AM - End of day 3 statistics .... Found: 66 Survivors: 802 Entries: 5,203 Hits: 155,811

Sunday, September 4

Begin to develop interface that will allow consistent data input for fm.org, msnbc and icrc for volunteers on site. Implement search functionality for comments field to allow volunteers more flexibility in locating survivors.

4:00 AM - Website relocated to second server to sustain/balance load, network switches upgraded.
Found: 68 Survivors: 813 Entries: 5,255 Hits: 167,044

12:00 PM - Mid day 4 statistics .... Found: 68 Survivors: 943 Entries: 5,960 Hits: 185,325

2:00 PM - Spoke with Bill Fitler ofthe Red Cross over concerns of connectivity. Bandwidth is doubled to alleviate bandwidth limitations.
Found: 68 Survivors: 994 Entries: 6,308 Hits: 185,342

12:00 AM - End of day 6 statistics .... Found: 73 Survivors: 1,925 Entries: 9,658 Hits: 241,251

Monday, September 5

Throughout the morning additional servers were added to the base system, other services at DCRE Labs were scaled back in an effort to free up bandwidth. By noon, the network pipe was sufficiently packed that the local network was impacted. Conversations with Yahoo (aka, "Saviour") began and the site was moved over to their servers and relocated as familymessages.yahoo.net.

12:00 PM - Mid-day 6 statistics .... Found: 78 Survivors: 3,604 Entries: 11,552 Hits: 275,251

The total transition time was less than two hours from DCRE Labs' Jinkle.com server to Yahoo's servers. Jeremy Johnstone (Yahoo) was extremely helpful during this process, on-site in Texas. Within an hour of bringing the site up at the new location, Yahoo reported an additional 25,000 hits, bringing the estimated hitcount to over 600,000/day.

Tuesday, September 6

The site will post over 13,000 cards and 1 million hits before its first week online. The Wiki community, the Red Cross, Yahoo as well as countless volunteers and families across the nation continue to pour data into the system, update cards as more survivors are found and families reconnect.

Begin work on Missing Children functionality for interface. Working with Yahoo! to integrate updates in data between FamilyMessages.org, NOLA.com and the Red Cross databases so that an update at one site updates all three.

There will be more updates as the site continues to grow. There will be database integration details, implementation of additional RSS feeds and PFIF work, collaboration with Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.

But the heart of the story and the original purpose of it all was born within the first hours of a tragedy and realized throughout the first critical days as a community of individuals (online and onsite) came together to help a community along a coast weather the aftermath of the storm and in the process.
FamilyMessages.org would like to thank everyone who helped us realize what a few good intentions can do in an otherwise chaotic world.