Like a good geo geek I spent my “holiday” digging fast and deep to contribute to the community around providing information assistance and monitoring around Gustav’s path through Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Louisiana. The result was a quick prototype map: http://crescentmaps.org/gustav/.

There were several issues at hand – one was the lack of available, accessible data. I started adding data sources to the wiki page, and when available uploaded them to GeoCommons Finder! tagged ‘gustav’. Sean offers great reasons on the importance of data sharing (and some more really great previews of Maker!).

Ed shares his thoughts on the overall experience and also questions the impact? Having spoken often with people such as Jesse Robbins and Mikel on their work in helping out in disaster response technology development and deployment the primary lesson I’ve picked up is: iterate.

Of course, Gustav fading out does not mean everything is clear and over. New Orlean citizens are still not supposed to come back into the city, there are still major power outages, and there was already a huge amount of work continuing from the Katrina recovery. There has been a marked neglect of public assistance on non-US regions such as Cuba and the DR. In addition, there are more storms coming up this season – so make sure and pitch in to help out if you can.