My Colleague Jennifer Granick is the newest columnest at WiredNews. In her first column, she describes how some innovative websites were able to centralize information about Katrina victims by building a system that automatically combined information from the dozens of refugee listing sites into a single, searchable database that family members could use to find each other.
That site, katrinalist.net is according to Granick, is tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens, and is why In the absence of intellectual property protection or technological barriers to information access, courts and legislatures must allow free, unfettered use of data and machines that owners place online and leave publicly accessible.