I agree with both sentiments.

My only issue is that we had the Tsunami in January and this catastrophe now. When are the federal and world (UNO) governments going to learn that sharing this kind of information is critical both to the relief efforts (how many refugees er.. evacuees do we have and where are they?) and to the long term mental health of the persons involved.

By immediately lowering the stress level of being able to locate both friends and family, the process of moving on can be much easier to deal with.

It is amazing that this kind of infrastructure could be literally tossed together in a matter of days. Perhaps we need to look not just the current crisis in order to put volunteer effort into being better prepared for the next one. And this WILL happen again.

Rocky, IIRC you sold your soul (or at least one hour of your time) to help the tsunami victims in February. Would you be willing to motivate and encourage this kind of system for both victim and geographic information world wide? Couldn't the MVP's be motivated to building a permanent backend that could used NEXT time. Couldnt businesses with test and backup systems be called upon to be prepared to donate servers and bandwidth to help?

Speaking geekspeak. If the data structure is killer, you have efficient 'business' objects and you design one or more killer transport layers, building a front end the day something happens is trivial. Having pluggable systems for generating SMS and e-Mail notification of flagged individuals, just waiting for the corporate sponsor to jump in and carry the costs is critical in times of need. Being able to efficiently generate and care for data should be possible without having first build and debug the data structures on day X.

This should be a lesson in preparedness, not only for the FEMA but for the volunteer capacities of thinking, caring geeks...