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Posts from the ‘New Jersey’ Category

Jul 24

Interview with Alyssa Durnien, full time volunteer and affected resident, New Jersey

"When I first started, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks. Now it's more feeling it's going to be over a year at least. I'd like to see people getting back into their houses feeling more comfortable coming and getting the services that we're offering. But the numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And that's kind of eye opening...we are not back to normal and everyone thinks we are. They think that the storm is past and the damage should be over. And there's houses in this community that haven't even been touched yet. And there's, you know, people just starting the cleaning process. And it's six months later, so now they're tackling mold and mildew and a lot of other issues that we didn't think existed prior."

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Jul 24

Interview with Occupy Data member working with Occupy Sandy

" I'm trying to remember from social media my perception at the time. The only thing that comes to mind specifically is the sort of the needs hashtag that had come up that I think was effective at both highlighting needs and also getting people to respond to those needs. And I think I was surprised by the effectiveness of the hashtag in doing that because a hashtag can be a pretty blunt tool given that anybody can use it for any purpose that has nothing to do with the hashtag itself. And it's also very limited in terms of how much data it can contain in a tweet, for example. But I was pretty impressed with how that was able to manage so much of the communication load in a very informal way."

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Jul 24

Interview with two Occupy Sandy New Jersey organizers

"One of the things we've been starting to explore is helping to develop worker cooperatives because there are so many unemployed people with skills ... I'm really excited about the opportunity to give- to create jobs for people, to create a livelihood that doesn't involve the existing system and doesn't involve people being exploited by people, people making opportunities for themselves."

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