TED Talks has a good presentation by Lalitesh Katragadda titled Making Maps to Fight Disaster, Build Economies. The focus is on Google Map Maker, and how during a 2008 cyclone event in Myanmar 40 volunteers from Google digitized 120,000km of roads, 3,000 hospitals, and logistic and relief points in 4 days, helping the UN and others get relief workers and supplies to the area.
One of the interesting stats: in 2005 only 15% of the world was mapped to a “geocodable” level. Stuff like this is why I love TED Talks.
