GIS and Disaster Relief

My current focus topic is on the use of GIS to accelerate disaster relief. I did not see GIS being used to its fullest capability during the Kashmir Earthquake relief effort. Global Connections spearheaded a great effort to make imagery available, but I believe that we, as relief providers did not do a very good job of collecting and sharing the data which would let others know what we were doing and where we were doing it. A GIS like ESRI's ArcGIS is a good platform to capture and publish these data in a map form, but the software is costly and the computing requirements and training may make it "too hard to do" for many relief providers. Other platforms which we can use to share data are free programs like GoogleEarth. Many times I flew to areas which had already been visited by other relief providers. I know that at the same time we were missing other locations which desperately needed help. By creating a common operational picture of what was going on, what was needed, and who was where, we could have ensured better coverage and distribution of relief. I'm very interested in any thoughts or experiences in this or other relief efforts. Let me know what worked, what didn't and how you would do it better.