After Hurricane Katrina hit, the focus of New Orleans became recovery. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) has been working hard at identifying where people are returning to their neighborhoods by using direct mail marketing or Junk Mail. The GNOCDC.org website is the most widely used source of data about New Orleans’ neighborhoods and surrounding parishes. They’ve been able to show the population recovery of New Orleans over the past 4 years on their population recovery website. What has been really good about this website is that it has freed them to do what they are good at, democratizing data. Using hosted web services such as Google Maps and Amazon Web Services keeps them from being IT or web administrators of their web products. They just author the data on their desktops and publish to the hosted SaaS sites and know that their uses will be able to get the data when they need it.
