This is a cross-post from the Mapufacture Blog, but I wanted to point out an article published in Business Week: Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes that discusses the role of collaborative mapping in emergency response situations. In particular it highlights the work of GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture, open geodata, and easy to use tools. Read the Mapufacture post for more thoughts on the article.

There is quite an underlying question here about the importance of both crowd-sourcing as well as curated, or expert data and tools. I believe moving forward there will be a lot of effort mixing the differences as well as applications that allow for the proper use and understanding of the data and published maps.

One minor point that is disappointing about Business Week’s site is the lack of external links to the organizations or tools. The only links are to Business Week’s own internal listing for businesses. In fact, besides the Digg & del.icio.us taggings, I don’t think there is a single link on the article’s page that isn’t either an internal link to Business Week, or through one of their advertisements.

Last week, Alan Gutierrez gave an excellent presentation at the Burton Catalyst Group titled “How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software” or “Innovating Your Way Out of Total System Failure” . Get the slide deck (powerpoint, 32MB)) and digg the story here.

It’s a compelling tale of emergent behavior by a community to leverage the tools it has at hand to enact powerful change. Too often large tools are built to be the end-all-be-all solution to perceived problems and pain points. However, the actual tried and true method of cobbling together solutions from a variety of tools, each as appropriate, leads to agile toolsets and better communication.

On a very similar note, my talk for FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town has been accepted. Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS will present the technical details of utilizing open-data, open-source and closed-source GIS tools, loosely coupled systems, workshops and open discussion to build cartographic visualizations. As a developer I enjoy tech-talk, I find the application based presentations much more interesting.

The presentation will use the New Orleans mapping as the case study, and while I can’t convey the “in-the-field” experiences Alan, Francine, Karen, and the others living in the city can tell, I hope I can share the experiences to inspire other communities to employ similar tactics to engage their neighbors and government.

The project is still very much a work in progress, but it’s exciting for exactly the reasons Alan gave in his talk - people are already doing the effort and passion - just help them pull the pieces together to have a great impact.

Two months ago I talked about working with Alan from Think NOLA to provide tools and technologies for bringing together the quickly growing user-generated datasets, collaborative mapping, and historic information towards advocacy, awareness, and planning in rebuilding the neighborhoods of New Orleans.

What has been most amazing about the project is that there were emergent, self-induced projects that were actively addressing many areas of capturing information. They are using Flickr for geotagged photos of historic buildings, spreadsheets of demolition permits exported as KML, and key historic maps that outline the original city planning.

The project was selected as a finalist in the NetSquared challenge, which means they were given the opportunity to come out to San Jose to meet with the other 20 projects and discuss their ideas, goals, progress, and cooperations. While the conference itself will award three top-voted projects with funding, the point of the conference and discussion isn’t solely this monetary support.

In planning for the conference, the entire discussion occurred publicly on Alan’s Blog at http://thinknola.com/post/gis. Through open discussion, numerous other projects and individuals contacted Alan to share support, data sets, ideas and future collaborations. NetSquared served as a catalyst for focusing a specific set of projects, but the longer effect is that it has brought together people that will carry the project forward and make sure everyone succeeds.

As a prototype, I used Mapufacture to combine together Francine’s Flickr photos, planning documents of school rebuilding, and the 1924 Taylor’s planning map of New Orleans. It is just a simple demonstration of what is possible using a combination of Neogeography, GIS, and community participation. The next step will be to build better tools for basic analysis and discussion. In addition, the data is open and available for other people to download for their own visualizations, analysis and collaborations.

Prototype: http://mapsomething.com/demo/neworleans

If you haven’t already heard, there are only a couple more days (Monday, March 24, 2008) to vote for the The NetSquared Mashup projects. NetSquared sponsors ‘mashups’ that promote and enable social change. This can apply to a very wide variety of projects, from awareness to funding aid. It’s incredibly easy to vote, and the top 20 voted projects of the 120+ submissions will go to the NetSquared conference in May to pitch their project for additional resources and also engage closer to the rest of the community.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting - and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya - where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions - so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions - I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 - so please register and vote!

GeoPress, the WordPress plugin that makes it very easy to add location, maps, Microformats, GeoRSS, and KML to your blog, was has been neglected for awhile. Some very nice users have sent in bug reports and I’ve been working through these and update the v2.4beta to 2.4.1 today. You should be getting it from the WordPress Plugin repository. This way you get notified when new versions are available. If only WordPress had a simple mechanism for upgrading plugins without requiring downloading zip files and shell/FTP access.

Please let me know if you run into any issues. There had been numerous bugs in the beta - and I think most of these have been ironed out. I also updated the KML to use KML 2.2 and some simple atom links to your blog and post authors.

Also, the geopress_map function has some nice functionality for being embeddeable in Archive, Category, and Search pages. Right now the function signature is a little long, but if you want to have all your markers for a category or search show up in the map, you use the following in your template (assuming you want your map to be (200px high, 400px wide)

This will embed the map with unlimited (-1) locations from the category (unless you have lots of geo-posts in a single view). Check out my conference blog post archive.

There have been numerous requests for per-item and categorical styling. This shouldn’t be too hard to add. And also per-post zoom and map types. Also I will be updated GeoPress/MovableType to converge on the same feature-set.

Also - if you have any updates/patches/suggestions for GeoPress - chime in (and contribute code