gis

Most of the maps we use look familiar to us: for instance, most Americans can recognize the shape of the continental United States whether it's appearing on a weather map or in a newspaper article about the economy.  Sometimes, however, ordinary maps depicting geographic area aren't the most useful method of visualizing our information.

I just watched the trailer for the new Penn State public broadcasting series, the Geospatial Revolution Project -- for a geo-geek like me, it was truly awesome!  A bit of context for those of you who can't watch the video right now, from the GRP website:

Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.  The project will feature a web-based serial release of eight video episodes... the episodes will culminate in a 60-minute documentary. The project also will include an outreach initiative in collaboration with our educational partners.

We're looking forward to seeing what these outreach materials are as well.  The website mentions K-12 programming but also civic/community participation, so hopefully we'll see some useful materials that we can add to our nonprofit mapping resource library!

We're very pleased to announce that MapTogether.org's proposed nonprofit mapping session - "Maptivism: GIS for the People!" - has been selected for presentation at this year's Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference to be held in Sydney, Australia this October.  FOSS4G is the annual international conference for developers and implementers of Free/Open Source GIS Software, and this is a great opportunity to share the awesome  neogeography work our communities are doing with the global GIS/mapping development community!