This wiki is a collection point for information about Recovery 2.0 - an opensource disaster recovery initiative. All hosting (Socialtext and hosting contributed by Socialtext) and labor is contributed.

Recovery 2.0 was crystallized in a post by Jeff Jarvis based on discussions going on around the web in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It's designed to be a clearing house for independent initiatives towards building reliable web-based platforms for disaster recovery efforts.

It builds on posts from many people concerned about our ability to do better next time.

What's The Philosophy and How Does it Work?
Project-based collaboration is handled by separate, self-selecting groups with independently-chosen mechanisms. Recovery2 is the place for reporting out what's going on in each project. Ideally, it's a support mechanism for emergent networks of people swarming around given tasks.

Those emergent groups will choose their own communications, always. It's not our job to dictate anything. Some goals are to try and document best practices for these kinds of collaborations, and to define a list of issues that each group might need to address, like language localization, documentation, training, and designing for scalability.

Only a small percentage of people are actually interested in recovery2's operations as such. They're more interested doing something on their own projects or in finding a project that speaks to them and that they can contribute to. That's what we suggest people do. That's the way we want it - not because we don't want help, but so that most effort goes towards solving problems rather than administration and overhead.

The things we're trying to provide facilitate interaction and coordination between people, organizations, realworld projects and applications.

How would this work? A group like the Shelterfinder project might post a call for participants, get some folks working, and process however they wanted. They might then post their preliminary standards on the wiki for discussion and review. Lastly, they update with an API and specs. As a result, anyone interested in working with shelter location information could already find what's been done more easily. Work doesn't stop on real-world things while people argue about formats and standards - those emerge from the work being done.

Individual projects come and go - the tsunami wiki, for example, has already disappeared. A central repository for information on standards, projects, practices, and design is likely to survive longer, and individual efforts will have a longer effective life.