google maps

The Arthritis Foundation's Heartland Region office serves Americans with arthritis throughout the upper midwest.  Arthritis affects tens of millions of Americans each year - the second most common chronic condition after heart disease.  When your organization's constituent base is that large, it's important to make sure that you're offering services to as many people as possible and to make those services as accessible as possible.  In this article, we'll examine how the Arthritis Foundation is using mapping technologies to meet those requirements!

The Google Earth blog today included several links to near-real-time maps of the California wildfires, visible in Google Maps and Google Earth:

• The LA Times created this Google Map (Google Earth version) of the fires in the LA region
• The US Forest Service has this Google Earth file (based on NASA satellite data) of near-real-time fires for the entire continental US

For those of you without access to Google Maps or Google Earth, CALFIRE (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) has plenty of up-to-date information on the fires, including frequently-updated incident maps covering the entire state.

Yesterday, Lily posted an article introducing readers to Google's "My Maps" feature, which allows people to construct their own maps, with points, shapes/regions, formatted text, images, video, and more.  This easy-to-learn mapmaking tool is being used by many nonprofits to create maps of their communities, their causes and issues, and various other geo-nifty applications.

The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has long since been a hero to me: the dedication, the participatory politics and the clear and open campaigns that are respectfully fought. It seems only fitting to use their fabulous community resource map - created in conjunction with the Open Youth Network - as an example for this article. First, take a look at what it has going for itself: