The Rising Tide Conference is still going down on the weekend of August 25-27, 2006. The venue has been confirmed – New Orleans Yacht Club (not to be confused for anything resembling snooty) at 403 N. Roadway St. [map]
As a reminder, this convention is the group effort of local bloggers and is
… for all who wish to learn more and do more to assist New Orleans’ recovery from the aftermath of the natural disasters of both Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the manmade disaster of the levee and floodwall collapses, and the incompetence of government on all levels.
We will come together to dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels.
We aim to be a “real life” demonstration of internet activism as the nation prepares to mark the one year anniversary of a massive natural disaster followed by governmental failures on a similar scale.
Mark Folse and I are assembling a panel on Bloggers As New Media / The Influence of Journalists and Bloggers In Post-K Reporting. So far, we have acceptances from
- Jon Donley, the founding editor of nola.com,
- Daisy Pignetti, who is working on a PhD dissertation on this topic and will give a brief overview of the impact of blogs and online responses to Katrina, and
- Troy Gilbert of Gulfsails.
The next task is to “acquire” the boys of Interdictor and the anonymous Da Po Blog.
Adrastos will head up a panel discussion on Blogging Post-Election Local Politics. On the technical side, Alan Gutierrez will run web-publishing and wiki workshops and I will present for 30 minutes on Project Gutenberg and its usefulness in New Orleans schools, public libraries and homes. We also have Loki of HumidCity interviewing conference attendees for the New Orleans Oral History Project.
Ray In New Orleans has single-handedly coordinated our group volunteer effort with Common Ground (Sunday post-conference). Here’s more on what we will be doing:
Volunteers have to arrive at 6:00am for their safety orientation, and then must commit to a full days work. CG provides goggles, gloves, and any other gear. Attendees should bring their own water, wear light clothes and durable shoes.
Depending on the number of people who show up, we would be working on various types of projects, from gutting to finish-out (pulling nails) to serving food. They will assign us wherever the need exists that day. If we have a big turnout, they will divide us up into teams of approximately 7 people each.
Thanks to Oyster for creating this conference and inviting us to be a part of it, dangerblond for being our Info Czarina, Lisa for taking on the position of Number Cruncher, Blake for forum, poster and website coordination, Alan for ThinkNOLA, Ashley for being Ashley and all of you who pitched in with ideas and hands.
The event is 18 days away, folks, so this is crunch time! Look forward to more Rising Tide and related posts.
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P.S. Scout Prime of First Draft (and Madison, WI) will be there!
I would love to meet up with a few of you over a beer and discuss the event. I may well be able to commit to more involvement. I will have to miss the work day as I will be at White Buffalo day interviewing its founder and a number of Mardi Gras indians for the NOLA Oral history Project.
You guys are so excellent. It’s wonderful to watch. I will try to get down there for this. :)
I’m going to try and be there. :)
Given what you’re working on, I think you’ll be very interested in our Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://hurricanearchive.org). We’re collecting the digital record of Katrina and Rita (to date more than 3,000 digital objects have been deposited in our database) in an “open archive” format. Like our September 11 Digital Archive (http://911.gmu.edu), the Hurricane Archive collects the history of this disaster as it is experienced by citizens themselves, not as it is interpreted by the media or authorities. We’ve already got more than 1,000 objects available for searching in the database and by the end of the month hope to have most of what we’ve collected up and available. Because this is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason Univesity, it’s going to live on online for a very long time–not until interest fades.
I’m not sure I can commit to the full work day as I am flying back to Tampa in the afternoon and who the hell knows if there will be security lines these days…but it seems my parents may need help gutting their house and have to have it done before the end of the month. I’m going to check with them and email the NOLA blog listserv too but I thought I’d start here!