Just read a great article from Grassroots Mapping about a public participation GIS project recently conducted for the Cantagallos community in Lima, Peru.  To help the community bolster their land claims to the territory they've settled, Grassroots Mapping led an aerial photography gathering mission using helium balloons and a camera.  Since the Google Maps / Earth imagery for the region was a few years old and didn't show recent changes to the environment, the detailed up-to-date aerial photography provided a more accurate base map for future public participation mapping efforts!

On January 12th, I co-presented two sessions on nonprofit mapping alongside Matt Blair of Humaninet, sponsored by Humaninet, NTEN, TACS, and PDXTech4Good.  Unlike Matt, my slides don't stand alone without me there to narrate, so it took me a little while to get around to annotating them.  :)  You can see Matt's excellent slide presentations on "Examples of Humaninet's 2009 Projects" and "Geo-Usability" at the Humaninet Maps 2.0 website.

The Ushahidi online mapping platform, first created and used in 2008 to track election-related violence in Kenya, has recently been pressed into service as a disaster response information platform for the Haiti earthquake response.  The platform allows for the collection, mapping, and reporting of incidents of various types, via both SMS (text messaging) and the Web.  Instead of mapping incidents of violence as in Nairobi, the platform is now being used in Haiti to track emergency reports of various types as well as the humanitarian response.

http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

Last week, we added a new example to our resource library: the Environmental Defense Fund's interactive mapping application of "dirty" heating oil in New York City on a building-by-building level.  Because this is a great example of a nonprofit mapping application, I asked the EDF's Kira Marchenese to tell us a little bit more about the data sources, mapping tools, and processes that took place to create this project.