Both GIS and government are going through changes, whether they like it or not. And those changes wouldn’t be happening unless there was a need for a better way of doing things. Disasters are so extreme, a traditional view of how these domains function is quite entrenched and that extreme is convincing. It’s also one reason why I’m interested in mapping and information technology in disasters — if new approaches can be shown to be useful here, than certainly they’d be useful in less extreme situations.

“Agile geography” is a process. Years have been spent making easy for anyone to put their stuff on a map, and that’s been done. It’s an achievement but not the goal. I don’t believe communicating in maps, and analysing in maps, should require any special training or exclusive domains. Rather this is a challenge for those that know about spatial analysis, or learning about spatial analysis, to make those tools more accessible. I’m all for helping bring about the cult of the amateur.

In the process, we’ve uncovered new and better ways of sharing information. Much of this is based on the accumulated knowledge of the web. Applying that wisdom to maps is what it’s all about.

So yes, the UK government had failings in communication and data sharing. That’s because they haven’t listened to the wisdom of the web either, and I’d guess are still applying a “top-down” approach to sharing data and coordinating. Governments and crisis responders can work in a more distributed fashion, and information will flow more effectively. Even the UN has started to recognize as such, with pilot disaster information sharing projects based on GeoRSS, http://www.gdacs.org/.

I too was impressed with the BBC mash-up, a good use of collaborative information sharing (not really mapping) and yes, given some decent data we could all come up with nice flood maps. But the point is … in the UK there are agencies which are publicly funded to do this kind of thing, there are well-rehearsed scenarios, contingency plans etc. but what happened? Where were their maps? Why was data sharing so poor?

At one point we attempted to start geo-coding Severn Trent’s list of bowser locations using a combo of Google Map, Streetmap.co.uk and (often inaccurate - as it turns out these location descriptions were provided by the lorry driver on his return to base) but this list of 900 was so fluid (sorry no pun) that it was a hopeless task in a traditional GIS sense. By the time we had a finished shape file it had all changed plus … what good is knowing WHERE a bowser is if you don’t know that it’s been filled or not! In the end we produced a few kml feeds but then gave up. Some else tried this too (see http://www.bluelinemedia.co.uk/bowsermaps.php).

In conclusion, yes it is nice that folk take it upon themselves to do mash-ups in times of crisis (that good old British war-time spirit) but why should they? The UK tax-payer is apparently paying for this capability already!