I received a tip from John at Photodoto.com about a person using Flickr to post missing person posters from the Nation Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Make sure to check out and be part of the discussion about it. Then later in the day I found a story about Lifetouch School Photography working with the New York City schools to integrate school photography with the NCMEC’s rapid response system.

We contacted Brian (aka tabhastal) about why he started posting the posters to Flickr and here are his responses…

1) Why did you start posting the photos?

I have always been involved in some type of social service. While doing a 20 year stint in the Air Force, I spent a few years volunteering with the American Heart Association and a child abuse crisis hotline in Southern California. I also was a Federal Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations where I specialized in interviewing sexually abused kids and those who abused them (and helping the abusers find new homes behind bars). So, using Flickr to help find missing kids is a natural thing for me and, since I take crappy photos, a better use of my time…

2) How do you get new photos? Submissions?

I initially contacted several law enforcement and social services organizations in the US, Europe and Asia. Some didn’t want to contribute because it was considered a violation of privacy in their countries, others felt it was too difficult and a few never replied. I ended up using the photos from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as they were totally supportive and made it easy for me to access their photos. I’m still talking with some groups in Ireland, Australia and the Phillippines and hopeful that we can do some good for them. It would be a pity if this stayed a US only effort. We do have one photo from a Flickr member about a woman missing from Bogota, so that’s a start.

3) What sort of a response have you had to the photos?

Everybody has been very positive so far (except for one jerk who posted a photo of a nude woman in the group. I banned him.) As for the management of Flickr…

I haven’t spoken with the Flickrati yet. I did review the Terms of Use and this doesn’t appear to be a violation, and I established some control processes to prevent misuse. I expect that the Flickrati are such cool, attractive, pleasant, intelligent, “with it”, and, did I say attractive?, people that it would be okay with them.

I have receive some really insightful suggestions on ways to better tag and sort the photos. This is so that people can narrow the views down to just those kids that are missing in their local area. I will be working with the other group members to make these changes.

You might want to play around with ways to display these photos on your blog. You can run a slideshow of the group by going to www.flickr.com/groups/helpfind/pool/show/ I don’t know how to incorporate that feed into a blog but I think that would be another cool way to get these photos in front of people. Based on advice from Thomas Hawk, I will create sets of photos from different regions so people can create slideshows of just their local missing kids.

Wayne Wirs over at linktiles.com/TheMissing is also posting these and other photos of missing kids in an innovative way.

Thanks again for helping! Having been a cop who looked for missing kids, I know that things like this can work… it takes folks like you to make it happen!

Thanks to Brian for doing this and for answering our questions. We’d love to hear your ideas on how to build awareness for this and other missing persons sites.