I guess you might want some background info.

I work for Yahoo!. 09/02/2005 an email looking for volunteer help at the Houston Astrodome landed in my Inbox. After confirming with my manager and then my wife I pestered all people involved with that email until they let me leave.  Three hours later I had packed my bag and boarded a plane to Houston. Being that I'm out of the Atlanta office I was able to hit the streets and check out the scene on Friday night.  Most of the other Yahoo!'s had to take a Red Eye from the West Coast.

I stayed at the Comfort Suites off of McNee about 500 yards away from Reliant Park (The Astrodome is in there).  As I cruised the hood around the Park I started to notice the roaming bands of people. Occasionally these groups would pass another group of people, and some of the members would recognize people in the other group. The scene was heart wrenching, my dry ass writing style really can not do it justice.

A typical conversation between the meeting bands of people. Names are made up.

joe: "Whoa -- Frank!"
Frank: Looking around -- "Oh no s@#t -- Joe 'sup."
joe and frank hug in a show of true emotion.
joe:"Frank man you find your people?"
frank:"Some" - "I've got my mom, wife, and kid" -- "we don't know where -insert another list of people are"
frank:"what about you?"
joe:"So far only my cousin --- over there"

Hearing that conversation take place multiple times; as I lurked on the streets of Houston, I finally understood how important it was that we help. I also was (and still am) extremly proud of Yahoo!. For digging into it's  meticulously planned budgets and stomping all over that, to send such a large group of people to the "mega shelter".

09/03/2005 09/12/2005

OOooUUUccchhh, I forgot I had a wake up call for 6:30 AM.

Without bogging myself or you down on the details of each day I'll give ya brief list of stuff I worked on.

Fixed network problems.
Helped roll out calling center.
Got a couple work buddies to setup bugzilla in order to better coordinate with multiple PA systems.
Trained people in how to use it and manage it.
Coordinated with the facility, Red Cross, and TFA (http://www.techforall.org ) in order to provision two more computer centers.
Convinced a couple Yahoo!'s they wanted to do massive cable management in one and completly roll out the other.
Helped receive and or coordinate the reception of computers from excellent company's like SBC, HP, and AMD.


"Dude, did you just say bugzilla was used?"

Yup.

So here was the problem, you have a family member you know is in Houston at the "Astrodome". So you go to Houston and notice 22,000 people  just as freaked out as your family member. How do you go about finding them?

Some people started taking messages in Section 262 of the Astrodome, which in turn would be read out over the PA system. The person requesting the message to be read was instructed to hang out in Section 262 and wait for the PA announcement.

This really sucked for the volunteers. They had to run up the ramps from Level 2 to Level 5 every 15 minutes.

So after a little brainstorm session with Andrew Adams and Jeremy Johnstone. I got on the phone and started to convince people they need to get someone else to watch the grill. Then haul it into the house and start the process of installing bugzilla on a machine that was not standard in any shape or form. (Just take my word on it. It was tricky.)

Numerous people helped me manage the process.

Richard Knight  - a Red Cross volunteer.
David Toner     - a Yahoo!
James Hilliard  - a Yahoo!
Elizabeth Clark - with Motion Computing -- They donated a number of their Tablet PC's and did excellent work.
Pam             - I don't know her last name
Kat             - I don't know her last name
and
LIZ HENRY       - the extrordinary blogger girl. -- http://badgerbag.typepad.com

So the person who was looking for someone would go to a message center and ask a volunteer to get a message to the PA person. The volunteer would input the data into Bugzilla and the PA announcer would read the messages out every 15 minutes. This system was eventualy roled out to all three buildings of the Reliant Park and the PA people were able to keep each other in sync. I was told that hundreds if not thousands of people hooked up via a combo of this method and the intial Internet search to figure out where to go to begin with. I am very humbled that I played a small role in the process.

I would also like to thank the people that helped me keep my head on straight as I was juggling my little projects. All of the above mentioned people for sure. But also EXTREME SPECIAL THANKS TO Hillary Mickell  and her GQ fighter pilot husband Paco. Him for not freaking out with me calling his wife so much, and Hillary for talking. Hillary you helped me stay moderatly sane THANK YOU.

Also thanks should go to Meg Garlinghouse who was always available to help me coordinate with remote groups of people or prioritize the projects I had in movement. Without that help I don't feel that the things that worked would have work as easily.

For now we are still not up to date.

James