YOU’VE SEEN PLENTY of the pictures: milling, ragged, distraught refugees; overwhelmed aid workers taking down information; families reuniting; others frantically scanning list after posted list. More than 750,000 souls in refugee encampments around the world—a collection of hurt no technology can fix.

Yet a database of who’s where would at least help re-knit communities and families that have been rent asunder.

The most effective effort of this kind so far, Kosovonet.org, is the brainchild of Father of the Net Vint Cerf and Czeslaw Grycz, head of the Poniecki Foundation. It started (as such things often do) as a casual conversation in which both gentlemen wondered if it mightn’t be useful for such a database to exist, discovered it didn’t, and decided to create it.

Rather than building a database, however, Kosovonet.org finds itself connecting various databases kept by agencies already working in the field. It’s an impressive technical effort—and it’ll require an even more impressive political effort to keep it together.

The technical barriers aren’t insignificant; this ain’t your ordinary plug-and-play production. Most of the camps have line-of-sight access to microwave transmission towers, but using more traditional systems (such as routers, the computers that handle most network traffic elsewhere in the world) is impractical because of concerns ranging from bureaucracy to hacker attack.

The most resistant barriers, however, have been political. Established aid agencies are much like large corporations—they have their systems, they like their systems, and if the systems aren’t up to snuff, they’ll look internally for answers, thank you. According to Grycz, this territorialism is both justifiable and frustrating: “Aid agencies,” he says, “have their hands full with very practical priorities; ideas coming out of the blue are not necessarily helpful to them.” Additionally, there’s traditional conflict between established agencies (which have stature, respectability, and experience) and newer grassroots groups (which have the flexibility to adopt fresh solutions and no corporate-style bureaucracy to battle). Kosovonet.org sits in the middle.

Currently Kosovonet.org manages the internal camp communications network, which is not publicly available but acts as the main information conduit among the camps. There are an increasing number of aid workers using laptops to gather information (often private, occasionally sensitive) in the field; Kosovonet.org writes code that lets folks query that data without compromising its security.

GRYCZ IS NOT the first to view Kosovo as an info war, but he feels that the Kosovo conflict is the first to treat the Internet as a field of fire—and that the battle is for the very identities of the displaced. Decades or centuries ago, aggressors might obliterate gravestones in a cemetery to erase the ethnic roots of other citizens. In Kosovo, Serbs have made a point of systematically destroying the myriad pieces of paperwork and documentation that make up 20th-century life. Think of it as ethnic-identity cleansing.

Grycz suggests that it may be time for a top-level (read: multinational, perhaps UN) conference that assesses how prepared the world’s humanitarian agencies and other concerned parties are for large-scale turmoil, and how info war is viewed ethically. Aggressors in Kosovo, says Grycz, “have taken away identity from [Kosovars], since in this age identity is partially established by any number of seemingly trivial documents. If I were a judge at the Hague, I might rule that destruction of these documents is a high crime against humanity. Possessions, history, status—they’re all in the paperwork.”