Update on Katrina Data Entry

We got amazing turnout of data entry volunteers yesterday afternoon. At one point, we likely had about 100 people entering data simultaneoulsy. That was a good and bad thing – the server running the database crashed under the load, and we had to take the whole process offline for several hours.

We came back up again around 10PM EDT last night and a large amount of data entry was done overnight. The interface to enter data now lives on my server (which appears to be handling the load comfortably… so far!) and the backend now lives on servers provided by the folks at salesforce.com. (I could probably use a mirror or two if anyone wants to mirror the HTML data entry page. Let me know.)

At present, we are able to enter data, but not retrieve it. Salesforce will be bringing an interface to search the data live in the next day or two (as I was just reminded, it _is_ a holiday weekend.) Until that’s up, there’s no way to retrieve the data or correct previously entered data.

We could use volunteers to claim more chunks of data and do data entry. To find out what’s needed, please go to the wiki – read the instructions and get involved, if you’re able to. Thanks!