Project BackPack and SeedWiki
Saturday 10 September 2005
Berkeley, CA
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Last week three school-age sisters in a Washington DC suburb watched the televised stream of images of Katrina refugee families. They wanted to know how they could help their peers, the children in their age-groups now in temporary shelters, far from their destroyed homes and forever away from possessions that helped frame their lives. These sisters talked to their father about an idea: the idea was to send children the thing every kid has - a backpack of things ranging from clothes and small toys to school supplies.
Project Backpack -- a relief effort for the children of Katrina, was born from this simple idea and helped along with a handful of emails to fellow parents in that suburb. Within a few days hundreds of children and their parents were filling backpacks and preparing them for shipment to refugee sites in Texas. Three days later, participants numbered in the thousands. A Public Radio news item about these children helping children fed the strength of the effort. People from all 50 states emailed they wanted to help. From a goal of 1000 backpacks, over 5000 were collected in the first week and shipped to kids who needed them.
What we are seeing is an amazing example of grass roots activism that emerges with remarkably little organizational support.
Support has come from another approach.
From the earliest days of the effort, the girls' father -- Steve Kantor -- used a kind of software that's only recently attracted any press attention. What Mr. Kantor used is something called a wiki.
Wikis are best thought of as a set of tools you use to build the kind of web site you need. They offer a collection of features that remind us of email, online meeting software, web- and desktop- publishing, databases, web portals, and social networking sites. In the case of Project Backpack, what was needed and what was quickly built was an interactive online 'place.'
Project Backpack selected an online environment named SeedWiki -- a product created and supported by a small eponymous Berkeley, California, company.
While it's impossible for anyone involved with this software genre to claim a long history, SeedWiki makes a convincing argument for its veteran status from having offered this tool for almost four years. SeedWiki has been a pioneer in creating easy-to-use online environments and it has led the nascent wiki industry in offering free and universal access to its services. Project Backpack is one of hundreds of organizations and work groups that use SeedWiki's hosting service.
In the first few days of the Project Backpack wiki, nearly 11,000 visitors have had the ability to read and contribute practical information and new ideas to the effort. This is more than a democratization of input: it is nothing less than accepting the reality that groups can collectively steer an organization. It is, as the wiki community often states, a reality where 'Everyone is smarter than any one person.'
The mushrooming success the Project Backpack is in no small way a by-product of the fact that site visitors from across the country have created links to more information about contacts and distribution centers. They have suggested other relief agencies that can work alongside this effort. And they have created new logos and brochures for volunteers to use as they help gather and ship these precious new possessions to the children of Katrina.
Steve Kantor says this best:
Project BACKPACK took off because SeedWiki provided a tool to create something where no one was in charge but everyone was in charge.
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For more information about Project Backpack:
project wiki -- http://projectbackpack.seedwiki.com
Steve Kantor: father and project director -- steve.kantor@gmail.com
For more information about SeedWiki:
company site -- http://seedwiki.com
Tom Portante tomportante@yahoo.com
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