Online co-ordination strategies

I don’t usually repost from other blogs, but this was too funny to pass over. “David Weinberger”:http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ was talking about “Recovery 2.0″:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/09/05/recovery-20-a-call-to-convene/ and the ways to co-ordinate to help those involved in Hurricane Katrina. “Here’s what he had to say”:http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004502.html:

How you think that coordination should happen says a lot about your view of the Web.

A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of victims, relatives, disasters, relief efforts, locations, threats, supplies, routes, relief agencies, medical records, doctor appointment books, local bus schedules, and stock market data.

A Web 2.0 approach would create APIs among recovery services offered on the Web and wait for hackers to build something useful. Whatever the hackers create would include plotting something on Google Maps, a requirement for all Web 2.0 apps.

A microformats approach would spend a weekend coming up with a quick-and-dirty set of useful metadata, preferably modeled on Amazon.

The regulatory approach would ask the pharmaceutical, transportation and recording industries to come up with a set of guidelines for the distribution of relief supplies with the primary objective of making sure that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.

Web 2.0 all the way