An aid worker from the European Commission holds a PDF printout from OpenStreetMaps.

The humanitarian relief effort underway in Haiti is proving the true potential of open source map building. Don't take my word for it, follow the Tweets [2] and blogs [3] of my friend Schuyler Erle. He's on the ground in Port-au-Prince along with Tom Buckley, a developer of mapmaking program GeoCommons Maker [4]. The pair are advising the World Bank on the use of crowd-sourced mapping, primarily through the open-source program OpenStreetMap [5], in the relief and recovery effort in Haiti. They are also dealing with rain, illness, PowerBar meals, World Bank contacts snowbound back in DC, and bureaucratic alphabet soup.

"Since mid-January, we've seen a whole set of interlocking technical communities swung into gear to piece together geographic information to help relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti: OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, CrisisMappers, and so on," Erle writes. He's an open-source smart maps ninja--cofounder of OpenLayers [6], author of the books Mapping Hacks [7] and Google Maps Hacks [8], and creator of a program that allowed for historians to make crowdsourced improvements to the New York Public Library's digital maps archive [9].

"The most amazing thing to me about this global response to the disaster is the degree to which volunteers have been able to make a significant impact on the relief situation while sitting at their own desks, thousands of miles away. OpenStreetMap [5], particularly, has been a model of distributed collaboration, with basically no one calling the shots, while a thousand people painstakingly build a map database of Haiti drawn from aerial and satellite imagery that's so detailed that the Ushahidi volunteers have to ask for a simpler version."

Erle says the humanitarian applications of Geographic Information Systems may truly comes of age as a result of this disaster. "OpenStreetMap really *has* become the gold standard for base map data in the relief and recovery effort in Haiti."

Photos by Schuyler Erle via Twitpic [10]