Deborah Cotton, LouisianaRebuilds.info

There are some words we are so beleaguered by, we don't use them anymore. We don't say Katrina, we just say "the storm" -- or "the Thing".

About a week after the storm, there were many stakeholders, from various areas of our community -- local government, state government, nonprofits, small businesses -- all talking amongst themselves about how to get information about the city out to those who were displaced and in various stages of coming back. Through a divine series of events, some of these stakeholders started talking to one another, and instead of each of them creating their own web property, they decided to come together and build a property together.

Out of this came LousianaRebuilds.info. This site has had many evolutions and manifestations, but our consistent goal has been getting good, real-time information online that can speak to two different audiences at the same time: those back in town trying to find the resources that are available, and those displaced folks trying to get the information they need to make decisions about coming back.

This is really like living in a civilization that has been shattered and blasted throughout the universe. From the outside looking in, it's hard to imagine the many details that come together to making your life work. Sometimes the basic pieces of information take half a day, even days to track down -- how to get utilities restored, where and when you can find food or gas in your area, how to find your doctor or old medical records. So this web site is dedicated to pulling all the information together that can help people reconstruct their lives.

Immediately after the storm, the only way that people had to find each other initially was thru text messaging. That was the first way we collectively jump-started our orientation around technology -- we taught people how to get online to search, how to get to the Red Cross web site to look for names.

The web site went live in March of 2006, maybe 8 months after the storm, which is pretty quick considering the entire city evacuated and came back. We wanted to make the information available on the site very simplistic and easy to find, easy to read. We have a huge literacy problem in Louisiana, so we made operating rules: the information had to be written at a 7th grade reading level, and accessible with 2 to 3 clicks maximum so that people wouldn't become weary trying to use the site.

In the beginning, people sharing their stories was a very important component of the site. Folks needed to be able to process what had happened to them, and we needed to know what had happened to our folks. Reading other peoples' stories had its own healing properties. Maybe you didn't know so-and-so from St. Bernard who evacuated to Fayette and is now in Wisconsin, but people being able to read that story gave some sense of recovery and stability. As I mentioned, we have a literacy problem, so a lot of the time, the stories came in misspelled, all in caps. But they needed to get the story out. People found value in pushing past their limitations to be able to communicate and reconnect with folks.

In the latest manifestation of the site, we broke our navigation bar down into categories -- community, organizing, health care, jobs and local businesses: the kinds of areas people need to reconstruct their lives and get started again. In the middle of the page, we have the "New and Notable", which changes every week as new resources come online. Some of most important and needed resources go in this area. On the far right side, we have quick links, which channel folks to our contractor guide and the Road Home program, with the state's various resources.

We run a lot of traffic reports to see where folks are coming from, what they're looking at, how long they're staying on pages, what's important to them. We're getting into an interesting place in our recovery: after the 2nd anniversary of the storm, our traffic began tapering off. We got, at our high point, 20,000 visitors a week and right now, we're at about 10,000. As people made up their minds whether or not they were coming back to New Orleans, we saw less traffic in the Moving Back Home guide, the unique collection of pages we had created specifically for the displaced community. But there has been more traffic in the homeowners section, the contractors guide, in our rentals section. That's been very telling for us and has guided the sorts of resources and information we're focused on getting for folks now.

When you're facing a disaster, you can get tunnel vision. It was our partners, from national level funders to local nonprofits, who asked how much longer the rebuilding would go on and pushed us to think about what the next phase might be. It was jolting and disturbing to be challenged like that in the beginning, but I think it ultimately was a healthy process. We do need that pressure to get us past picking at our wounds and seeing ourselves as evolving survivors rather than victims.

We are looking at what is going to be the next evolution of LousianaRebuilds.info. We have been leaning towards a site that is sort of what it is now, but also a go-to site for all types of information for the greater New Orleans area. It would be a combination of what the city web site would look like if it were fully functioning along with the information we have currently in terms of recovery assistance, plus information that would be of interest and benefit to the community in terms of the social aspects: community gardens, businesses that are back online, social events that are happening. So we are looking to have a more long term evolution ourselves in the near future.

What we're finding is that every disaster is different. We had a city that had to evacuate, a city that drowned. Water has it's own element, it's own particular way of destroying things that is unlike fire, unlike an earthquake. Only when you're in it do you know the details intimately of the thing that destroyed you and the things that you need, the processes that you need for pulling your life back together. We're in the process of working with the Annie E. Casey Foundation which has hired a consultant to study our resources and the various phases of development in order to inform other communities so that when another disaster happen in this country, this effort can be duplicated for another area.

[This article is based on a speech given by Deborah Cotton at the 2008 NTC in New Orleans.]