As soon as President George W. Bush exhorted viewers of a nationally televised speech to call a hot line number (1-877-568-3317) for help reuniting relatives driven apart by Hurricane Katrina, the alarms started. Media-stimulated calling activity will crash the public telephone network just as surely as a Category III hurricane will breach an inadequately engineered flood wall.

I thought the lesson had been learned in the mid-1980s when one of the major soft-drink makers displayed a toll-free number during half-time for the Super Bowl for fans to dial in order to learn whether they’d won a million-dollar sweepstakes prize. When hundreds of thousands of media-stimulated, inbound calls try to land on an inbound phone switch, it brings the network down and causes all calls to be blocked.

Telco industry veterans have a term for calls that are held up in the network during high-volume incidents. There’s more than a little irony to the fact that the term is ‘high-and-dry.’ From the point of view of Katrina victims, the inability to get through on the phone was regarded as just another instance where government agencies were unable to fulfill their promised role.

In the wake of Katrina, a number of private citizens – employing the Internet, groupware and collaboration platforms (aka ‘social networks’) – are doing amazing things. As the chief proponent of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT), one effort close to my heart is a project established by Steve Kantor, who has achieved national attention as the coordinator of Project Backpack – a grassroots relief effort that targets aid specifically for children who are victims of the hurricane by distributing 100,000 backpacks filled with clothes, books, personal hygiene products and other non-perishable items appropriate for kids (up to 18 years old) whose lives have been totally disrupted by the events.

In a related, complementary effort, Kantor conceived of a ‘Global Katrina 800 Number’ and set the goal of training and deploying 10,000 volunteers around the world to field inbound calls from the 500,000+ evacuees who are hungry for the best and most accurate information available regarding relief efforts and their options. The master plan and tactical steps are made available through a Wiki whose URL is:

(http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/katrina_global_800_help/)

Steve pursued a measured approach to a relatively large-scale problem. Project Backpack was inspired by his high-school-aged child, who conceived of the idea of getting backpacks and useful goods to displaced kids. They collected 2,000 backpacks in the space of a week. Steve then declared a goal of distributing 100,000 backpacks by September 30. And that became the marching orders for the group. The efforts were amplified and supported by a Web site, complete with links to guidelines for filling the backpacks appropriately and to a Wiki that is frequently updated with the most current information regarding where backpacks have been assembled, where they are needed and where volunteers are needed.

In the case of the Katrina Help Line, Steve set the goal of 10,000 volunteers within 100 hours. A link to the Wiki was made available to a mailing list of Asterisk application developers (Asterisk-biz) and, thus far, four individuals have volunteered to help with the system. Other candidates for distributed contact center platform technology include the use of whatever resources might be available courtesy of Vonage, Skype (soon to be part of eBay), Google Talk and Yahoo! The challenge is to start using these tools (or platforms) to facilitate a connection between the hundreds of thousands of people who need help and information and perhaps 10,000 ‘agents’ around the world who can fulfill those requests.

Consider this CAT Scan a call to action. Readers who have watched the passing events and wondered “what can I do?” (aside from making donations to the Red Cross or other appropriate charity) can now apply our well-hewn skill sets – especially involving contact center management, speech processing and IP telephony – to work for an excellent cause. For those of you not familiar with or comfortable using a Wiki as a platform for collaboration, think of it as a big, shared planning document. The home page contains links to more focused pages. All pages (except where expressly stated) are subject to ‘editing’ by any visitor/contributors.

Visit the Wiki. Contribute what you can. Support the effort.

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