I want to tell you an incredible story.

Last Wednesday night, a close friend of Managementblog, Cathy Muth, CEO of O. R. Colan Associates, watched the stream of video from Hurricane Katrina and recognized the need for a central place where family and friends could locate people displaced from the disaster. Her company manages relocation programs for public agencies and has worked for FEMA in the past. She contacted us with an idea to see if we could help create a web registry called “I’m-OK.”

So, we became a team. OR Colan immediately agreed to fund the site. Our chief programmer Brandon Stone (photoblogs.org) had specific ideas of how this site had to be put together to accomplish its goal.

We thought long and hard about how to handle the data requests, how to make the site quick, accurate and simple. We looked at other boards and noticed that they were jumbled, jammed with messages, ultimately irrelevant to the search for a family member or a friend. In 99% of the searches, it was all noise. With im-ok.org, the user puts in a phone number and immediately finds information about a person.

Or not. On most message boards and other registries, if there is no news about a family member, it might take an hour or more of useless searching to find that out. With im-ok.org, using the person’s phone number, the search takes three seconds. If there is no news, the visitor knows that immediately. The design team did not want to string someone out for an hour searching a database in vain.

We observed other message boards that became overloaded to the point where users experienced significant slowdowns. We knew that if the site proved successful, it would get hit hard. All of this was carefully considered in the architecture of the site before a stitch of programming was done.

The idea was simple, yet overlooked by most people trying to create registry sites. Tell a database programmer that thousands of people are going to input data and watch him cringe. How many different ways can you spell New Orleens, Biluxi and Metaree? Designing a site using a traditional database approach is flawed before it gets out of the gate. The overhead to handle the queries and the variations of queries is of immense proportions, which is fine if you have three or four months and an unlimited budget. Im-ok.org was structured in a few hours and functional within 24. We chose a single piece of meta data (a person’s telephone number) and created message boards around that. The site was up and scalable.

The launch was critical. Friday, September 2, at noon, the site was up, yet, no one knew about. We contacted newspapers, television stations and networks, but quickly understood that traditional media outlets might not be effective or fast enough. Because of our active participation in the blogging community, we knew the success of the launch would depend on the power of the internet and its connected groups of people.

The momentum began to pick up steam with blog postings, email lists and message boards. After two hours, people were posting real messages on the site. Within 24 hours, sampled traffic rates were running 1200 hits per hour. We put a stats stream on the site, so visitors could see, in real time, who was clicking through back- links from other sites all over the world. After 36 hours, we held number one listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN for Katrina I’m OK. MSN search also showed number one for I’m OK. The Alexa rating for the site hit 46,005 on Sunday, just 48 hours after launch.

The success of www.im-ok.org will ultimately be determined by how useful and helpful it is. It was created so other people could assist in its proliferation throughout the internet. It was a simple idea, to create a scalable application, using message boards centered around phone numbers so people could truly help each other in this time of chaos.

Here is where we need your help

You can help by coordinating volunteers at aid stations and relief centers to relay information back to people with computers to input the data. It is quick, just a phone number and a name. Then click a button that says, “I’m OK!” This will take initiative on the part of people to just do this. We are in Florida and cannot physically be there to do that work. We have more information on the site. You can volunteer at this email address: volunteer.im.ok@gmail.com. Please help. -TF