TsunamiHelp

9 years and 51 weeks ago, I was a part of something that changed my life in many ways. The TsunamiHelp blog.

It broke me, in some ways, re-made me in others. And it taught me so much. Not least about collaboration and collective goodwill. It lead to a certain amount of visibility (and I struggled with my feelings about that) and to, in some circles, being seen as an authority, almost, about things I had muddled through. It taught me a whole lot about the limits of my knowledge.

But most of all, it made me some friends who are close even today, despite me never having met some of them. It's a bond that will always be linked in my mind to that overwhelming tragedy, the South-East Asia earthquake and tsunami. So it feels, in a way, wrong to be grateful for those friendships. But I am, I am. I will never regret Megha, Bala Pitchandi, Dina Mehta, Neha Viswanathan coming into my life.

There were so many others, of course, who were part of that effort. Some drifted away, for one reason or another. Like Rohit Gupta, who, nevertheless, I remember only with fondness and admiration. Another special place is reserved always for Sanjaya Senanayake who died earlier this year. He and his friends in Sri Lanka brought home to us so much of the grimness of that disaster. Though I never got to know them as well, seeing Angelo Embuldeniya, Constantin Basturea, Nancy Bohrer, Taran Rampersad, Pim Techamuanvivit, Maitri Irwin, Rudi Cilibrasi, Anna Lissa Cruz, Balaji Bondili and others pop up in my social media feeds always makes me smile.

Then there were Ryze and blog friends who were part of it (some I knew from before and got to know better): Nandini Chopra,Amit Varma, Dilip D'Souza,Priyanka Joseph, Samit Basu, Jai Arjun Singh, Annie Zaidi, and so, so many others. There were more than 200 people collaborating on that project. Andy Carvin said, a little while ago, that in it were the roots of other projects, other disaster relief efforts that used online power. Google's People Finder, for instance. The methods we used are outdated now. They were outdated by even 2005, when other disasters struck and people evolved fresh approaches that worked more smoothly, used tech better, were more effective. And it continues to evolve, continues to improve. Case in point: the wonderful efforts, first in Kashmir, then the North-East and Andhra, of what has now become VOICE - incrisisrelief.