What else the above got me into:
Comms: I have asked a satellite data company to provide 10 satellite terminals for 90-120 days so we could take them to Louisiana for helping to coordinate response between different government agencies. This also allows us to bridge victims to online databases so they can tell people where they are, and find out where their family is. The Internet is the best source of information for the people there, but they are cut off and can't get to it! We are forcing them to live in a black hole of communications when they need communications most.
Robotics: Mark Micire [of American Standard Robotics] was in Biloxi, Miss., volunteering his services and his company's robots for search and rescue.
Integration: I'm on the Katrina Dev list for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project, which is an open-source effort to try to catalog all of the different online repositories of missing/found people. Red Cross has 4,000 entries in their missing/found database, and the local Gulf online newspaper has 30,000 last time I looked. It's important that we can bridge all of these resources into one interface.
Other great sites:
KatrinaShelter.com: Grassroots gathering of coders building a system for helping people find homes and shelters who lost theirs.
Katrina Information Map (Scipionus.com): Has a nice public interface where you can post any info you have about an area, and update other people's information or questions.
Gaps that need to be fixed:
Disaster response needs to be looked at like a system of cells, rather than counting on any one agency. No matter how hard any one group works, there is a limit to the amount of effort that they can put in to something as widespread as this. Instead of counting on one overarching body, we should supplement this by getting the Internet and communities involved by posting requests for help, and setting up a distributed set of authorities that can help get volunteers to people in need.
We need to have someone at every agency who is nothing but the Internet liaison agent, who is capable of understanding the online tools that are offered to them, as well as implementing them.
In North Carolina, hospital management at two facilities were able to e-mail me saying they had resources to share. Two fire departments called saying they'd go where needed. However, there is no way for people with such skills or resources to find out where they can contribute. The fire departments didn't deploy as many troops as they could have, because they didn't know where to deploy and the hospital resources were never sent. This is unacceptable. A Web-based system showing where there was still need could have solved this.