The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is clean and new, well designed and well funded. It sits at the edge of the University of Illinois’s main campus (UIUC), on the border of Champaign and Urbana. Its first floor auditorium is as wired as wired can be. I am sitting with about 40 others in that room, with perhaps 100 others observing from remote locations in Miami, Boston, Baton Rouge, and four other campuses. We are trying to figure out what we can do to help some of the least fortunate people in America.

“Katrina After The Storm” was put together by a University initiative called HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science Advanced Collabratory). The content ranges wildly, from entrepreneurs talking about their business models to graphic artists talking about their comic books, and it doesn’t always fit together well. The technology linking all the sites together also has its rough edges. But the stories out of New Orleans are gripping, people are meeting up, connections are being made. One thing is clear: nothing gets done down there until people make connections that cross industry and academic boundaries.

I have come here to find leads that digital educators can follow to get their wares into schools in the Gulf Coast. Most of the presentations don’t deal directly with schools, but many of them have common themes. One common theme is the power of information. For example, homeowners in flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans freaked out when they heard that planners were talking about turning the lowest-lying areas of the city into parks. You would too, if you thought that someone was going to prevent you from rebuilding your home. The rumor isn’t true – nobody is going to be forced to give up their property — but it did a lot of damage to the planning process because the right information wasn’t distributed first.

“Information flow and communication are critical elements of the planning process,” said Robert Olshansky, an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at UIUC. “If you manage information well, it builds trust. If you don’t, it makes people suspicious.”

Through wireless networks and videoconferencing, the group pondered how to get the right information into places that barely have electricity and running water. “The only way we knew that medical helicopters were bringing us patients was when we heard them coming,” said Dr. James Gregory, a trauma surgeon in Champaign who helped move a 100-bed mobile hospital into a basketball stadium in Baton Rouge in the days after the storm. “In any large-scale catastrophe, the first thing to go is communication. You have to plan for that.”

In the conference’s opening panel, llinois doctors and nurses who staffed a mobile “surge hospital” in Baton Rouge shared lessons from their experience. Left to Right: Anne Fox from the Central Illinois chapter of the American Red Cross; Sharon Dotson, a nurse at Champaign’s Carle Community Hospital; Dr. Bernard Heilicser; Dr. James Gregory; and Dr. Neil Winston, moderator.

Several presenters described heroic efforts to get communication systems up and running in the days after a disaster hits. Dan Reed of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill described an ingenious contraption – a weather balloon tethered to a pickup truck with a transmitter in the bed – that instantly gives wireless Internet access to anyone who has a sightline and the right laptop. Sascha Meinrath of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) described a successful effort, done on a shoestring budget despite various bureaucratic obstacles, to set up a wireless communication network in a storm—damaged area of Louisiana (see his presentation “Wireless Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina”). It became clear, as the descriptions of devastation bore down on us, that it will take a long time to get broadband access to schools throughout the Gulf Coast. After all, many of them did not have good access before the storm hit.

Dr. Gregory, who directed medical response for the Navy in the first Gulf War, reminded us that the key to getting things done in difficult conditions is to stay flexible and KISS, which is an old Army acronym meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. “We gave volunteers a slip of paper when they boarded a bus that was going to take them into the disaster zone,” said Dr. Bernard Heilicser, an emergency surgeon from south Chicago who co-directed the hospital with Dr. Gregory. “It described what they were going to do that day. That was the only way we had, and it worked.”

The mobile hospital ended up treating 15,000 people and one rescue dog. To see Dr. Gregory talk about his experiences, click here.

The Katrina Conference’s website has a live webcast, a podcast, a blog, and more. It’s worth a visit.