Slashgeo

The JAGIS-L mailing list points to a CNN article about geographers and hurricane Katrina's relief. GIS Corps has been mentioned here before. From the article: "Elhami, co-founder of GISCorps, said that since 2004, the organization's volunteers have responded to disasters such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, as well as efforts to provide humanitarian relief, sustainable development, economic development, health, and education in all parts of the world. The Corps had 20 volunteers on the ground in Mississippi less than 48 hours after Katrina's landfall."

A few recent geoblogs entry discussed the status of webmapping in India. There's Dan Karran's entry on Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data in India, which is on the same topic as the GEB's entry about local knowledge power for India mapping and APB links to an article about tackling urban problems with GIS in India. From the first link: "I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference. I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources." See also numerous Indian-related stories below.

I believe we can't overestimate the long-term positive impact of the OpenStreetMap project. They recently announced their first "complete" country available, the Netherlands. Why the Netherlands? Because they previously received money to make it a reality. I took a look at the state of my own city in OSM and I've been surprised at how fast data is being contributed by citizens, this is great news for freedom. See related stories below.