Donate your time to Katrina victims. From this blog entry: "...an interesting and important tech project: building a single database to resolve the dozens of “people missing” and “people safe” databases that have appeared on the web in the past week. If you’re searching for a missing friend or loved one .... you currently need to check dozens of online databases. If this project succeeds, there will be a single database that resolves all the outstanding information."

"We need two types of help on this project right now. If you’ve got a free hour to do data entry, we would love your help. Go to the Volunteer page of the wiki, follow instructions, choose and claim the chunk you’d like responsibility for. If you’ve got some wiki, Perl or PHP skillz and want to put in a bit more time, please let me know - I’m working through a list of unstructured data sources and writing sloppy hacks to generate chunks to assign to volunteers. I’d love help working through this, but this is an assignment that requires some ability with scripting and a bit of creativity. If you’re willing to give me a hand, I’d be very grateful - email me at ethanz AT gmail DOT com."