New Orleans Bound!

We're at Boston airport waiting for our flight to New Orleans (Hi back at you, Nel!)

On the drive down, I reviewed what it will take to finish mapping Gentilly. Unfortunately, our server will be down during this trip. We can't input the color codes so that others can see it on the Internet. But that means we can concentrate on mapping the rest of Gentilly. We won't have address lists for some blocks, unless someone helps us figure out a way to get address lists for a particular census block. But that can only slow us down and not stop us.

We're going to reconfigure our home page on the project main website http://www.gentillyproject.com, so that we can still post what our progress - by neighborhood and on the whole - on the Internet.

We have broken Gentilly down into 22 neighborhoods. 4 neighborhoods are already coded. Over a dozen of the remaining neighborhoods can be coded with in several hours with less than 20 volunteers. Last week, we met with the Gentilly Heights Vascoville neighborhood association president Gwen Hawkins. Their group will be mapping as part of a cleanup that includes 50 student volunteers, offered through the Disaster Recovery Ministry of the Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

I'm exchanging emails as I'm blogging now with Mirabeau Gardens neighborhood association president Laurie Watt. She has put out a call to her neighbors to volunteer and map on Saturday at noon. I doubt I'll have time before our flight, but I need to list this event on our project calendar. All it takes is about 10 volunteers to complete the mapping of Laurie's neighborhood by dusk on Saturday.

Tonya and Charlotte, two residents from Gentilly's Bancroft Park, have signed up to map on our project website. We estimate their neighborhood can be mapped in several hours with about 8 volunteers. Karma signed up on our website to help, and she's not even in Louisiana! She can spread the word to others, and she has professional interests and skills in the field of education that she can volunteer towards the restoration of neighborhoods in New Orleans.

Sign up if you can map with us in Gentilly for a couple hours this Friday afternoon or sometime Saturday. Or call us at our local UNO operations center tomorrow (Thursday) morning at the UNO Science Building at 504-280-1264. It will help to have standing volunteers who can work in any Gentilly neighborhood that needs help getting the mapping done.

We can do complete this pilot project to map Gentilly this weekend with your help. Come to Gentilly this weekend to help us if you can. Or tell others who can come what we are doing. Whatever you can do to help. Please do so. Visit this site every day through the weekend for updates of how things are going.

We can finish mapping the local progress in Gentilly before the New Year with your help and support. If we can get our server back up (http://icpd.dartmouth.edu), we're going to start inputing the color codes so that you can see the progress for yourself.