The Big Board Goes Open Source

The Big Board, a real-time collaborative mapping environment focusing on emergency response by Renaissance Computing Institute, has been released as an open source project.

The Big Board from Renaissaince Computing Institute on Vimeo.

It combines a traditional wiki (PmWiki) with a collaborative map interface, much like a collaborative white board on a teleconference. It can handle some basic geoprocessing (via PostGIS I’m assuming) and it can incorporate content via “feeds” (I’m assuming it’s GeoRSS or KML or somesuch).

It’s a bit heavy on the requirements end - the server needs Python 3, PHP, PmWiki, Postgres, PostGIS, and has to run on a POSIX compliant system (‘nix), and the client machine has to run some Haskell. But it looks pretty cool, and I’ve read so much Haskell hype lately I may have to check it out.