Tim Murphy is chief executive officer of Autonomechs, a North Carolina-based company that provides monitoring systems and communication systems for hazardous situations.

"We are all people who have been doing work on this information management side of disaster response," he told MSNBC.com.

The company's customers range from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Open. In an e-mail to MSNBC.com, Murphy laid out his perspective on post-Katrina relief as well as links to other Web resources:

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What I'm doing:
What I'm working on is being able to take information from people in the field who have immediate needs (insulin, rescue, etc.), as well as data from forward-deployed facilities (Red Cross, medical shelters) so that they can easily find each other, and people in the field can help themselves without counting on external help. You would be surprised how many responses for help came in on the Web, since nobody knew who to call for help. I had one posting about hundreds of people being trapped in a hotel.
Public groups that were trying to connect stranded victims with government response spent days looking for the person who would accept our growing victim list, showing who needed help, as well as what resources volunteer groups had to offer. Fortunately, the Coast Guard came through.
Once the Coast Guard was authorized to accept our victims list, we were able to assist responders in the field with getting to victims. This was one of the goals, but the immediate problem that we wanted to solve was the inability for people on the ground to communicate their critical needs, as well as the extra resources they could share, with one another. This was the priority. In the time that it took for our response groups to get in, many people on the ground were trying to save themselves, and we were doing everything we could to help them do it.
The tools that we've made have been opened up to all agencies, and is being kicked around by people at Red Cross and state emergency operations centers. It's tough to try to bring in a new tool like this with anyone who has bureaucracies to work against it. The bureaucracies of many response organizations simply do not allow for tools to be brought in by the community, and especially in the area of technology, new tools were created to help Katrina victims inside of 24 hours. The resources of the Internet need to have someone within a response organization to accept them if they are to be utilized. The technology is not the hard part. The hard part is finding someone in the federal area that knows what they are being offered, and has permission to use it.

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