Google announced a partnership with the World Bank today to make Google Map Maker data more accessible to government organizations in disaster scenarios. Google Map Maker is the tool for crowd-sourcing the editing and maintenance of Google's world map. Its user-generated data include locations of hospitals, schools, settlements, water sources and minor roads.
Access to these data will help governments, NGOs, researchers and individuals plan without waiting for the changes to be approved and added to the official maps. World Bank partner organizations, such as government and U.N. agencies, can contact World Bank offices to request access to the data. Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal and Haiti will pilot the project.
Think about how much stuff you have. Are you at your desk? Open the drawer next to you. What's in there? Do you really need all that stuff, or is some of it just taking up space? Is any of it electronic stuff? Any old cell phones or chargers for cameras that broke? What about CDs or DVDs for old operating systems? Does your computer even use those anymore?
There's value in all that stuff. Los Angeles-based startup KarmaGoat is working on capturing it, and then giving you 900 ways to give it away to charity. Sell your excess stuff online and donate the proceeds to the cause of your choice. It's just an experiment for now, friends exchanging things with one another. But lots of folks are buying a new phone every year. What do they do with the old ones? If KarmaGoat can scale up, all those phones could be re-sold as a swarm of little mini-fundraisers for any of almost 1,000 causes (so far).
Silicon Valley design agency ZURB is holding their fourth annual ZURBwired event on August 18, in which the firm donates 24 hours of their time to accomplish one mission for a nonprofit partner, whether it's designing a website, creating a fundraising campaign, or solving any other problem they can think of. The deadline for nonprofits to apply is Friday, August 5 (tomorrow). The proposal submission can be found here.
CoverCake, a service that tracks online conversations about books, is launching a new Web-based dashboard app tomorrow, turning its vast library of data into an analytics tool for publishers, authors and fans alike. The new analytics features will enable publishers and authors to measure the impact of promotion, publicity and social media campaigns by seeing the conversations they generate.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is firing back at the U.S. government for domain seizures related to a Spanish sports streaming site Rojadirecta..com. In an amicus brief filed by the EFF Monday, the open-Internet advocate sided with a petition from Puerto 80, the company behind the sites.
The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) seized the domains as a way to fight piracy on the Internet as part of its "Operation in Our Sites" campaign. The EFF joins Mozilla in fighting government domain seizures after Mozilla defied the Department of Homeland Security over Firefox extension MafiaaFire in early May.
Egypt's January revolution was not caused by tech but tech played a role, as a cursory glance at ReadWriteWeb's stories on the country show. Internally and externally, geeks came to the fore. Now that the country has rid itself of its former rulers, there is still a lot of work to do.
On May 14, a group of 75 Silicon Valley technologists, computer science students and others met at Stanford for a Cloud to Street hackathon designed to create tools Egyptian activists have requested.
Yesterday, the Associated Press announced that it would augment its syndicated news offerings with content taken from non-profit organizations. According to the announcement:
"Newspapers, for the first time, will be able to request that feeds of nonprofit materials be delivered directly into their content management systems through AP's Webfeeds software. The project will begin testing with nonprofit organizations in California and will use Internet delivery feeds that have been put in place at newspapers over the past year."
A recent Brookings Institute survey found that Americans want more media coverage of education. People said they want more information about their local schools, about violence on campus, about teacher performance and student achievement. But even if there was more reporting and better access to official data about crime and test scores and demographics and budgets, that would still be a pretty incomplete picture of our education system.
So imagine if you could have access to data about what over 165,000 teachers in over 43,000 public schools said some of their most important classroom needs were. Imagine if you had the data about over 300,000 classroom projects that have inspired some $80,000,000 in charitable giving.
That would give you a richer picture of what was happening in the American school system. It could highlight what teachers say they need for their classrooms. It could highlight what donors wanted to support.
So here you go then, because that's just what DonorsChoose.org is doing. The charitable giving website is releasing its data as part of a contest, aptly titled Hacking Education.
In partnership with Google, Bearstech and European Consulting Services, France's Red Helmets Foundation has launched a global missing persons search engine, Missing.net. The goal is to provide an instant platform for those involved in a natural or humanitarian crisis and their family, friends and coworkers, to find each other.
Until now, Google's Crisis Response team provided Person Search sites on an ad hoc basis, including sites for the earthquake in Haiti and New Zealand, and the latest in Japan. Red Helmets hopes to make its comprehensive site an enduring, permanent global feature of rescue response.
The World Bank has announced the launch of a Web-based urban development platform for July 1.
In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Institute for Urban Research, the Urbanization Knowledge Platform will link policy makers, academics, the Bank and other groups struggling to address the rapid increase in the size and importance of cities around the world.
