Start-up Uses Kites, Balloons to Map Oil Spill

Here's another new start-up that aims to empower citizens affected by the BP oil spill -- GrassrootsMapping.org. The New Orleans-based nonprofit is helping Gulf Coast residents take high-resolution aerial photos of the spill and share them online. The goal: to compile a public record of the spill and its ongoing impact.

"There's been a kind of media blackout of the spill; it's tough to see what's actually going on," Founder Jeffrey Yoo Warren told people attending the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York on Friday. "These maps create documentation that can be used as evidence for use in the legal arena and to help focus resources in clean-up efforts in the weeks and months ahead."

Since early May, the nonprofit has been assembling and distributing citizens' mapping kits that each contain a helium canister, a balloon, a kite, an inexpensive Canon camera and an array of simple office supplies, including a $3 roll of cotton string and a couple of paper clips. The cameras, programmed to shoot a new frame every 5 seconds, "produce imagery so detailed, that we can count animals and count vegetation," says Warren, a fellow at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. Once the images are captured by citizen mappers, they are geo-referenced and stitched into online composite maps, viewable in Google Earth and OpenLayers. The images are created at 10,000 times the resolution of daily satellite images posted by NASA, Warren says -- and, at a price of roughly $230 per kit, they cost far less to produce.

"By creating open-source mapping tools to include everyday people in exploring and defining their own geography, we are giving citizens affected by the spill some power in this crisis," Warren told PDF conferees and a VC panel that included tech angels Esther Dyson and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.  "All of the imagery we capture is owned by the residents."

Warren is working with another new oil spill-startup, the New Orleans-based Louisiana Bucket Brigade -- which is making a crisis-response map of the disaster -- to get the kits distributed more widely. (See my earlier Justmeans post on this group.)

Over the past five days, Grassroots Mapping, originally founded in January by Warren to produce citizen maps of the slums in Lima, has raised more than $5,000 for the Gulf project via Kickstarter. [Immediately after pitching to the PDF crowd on Friday afternoon, Grassroots Mapping was able to raise nearly $495 more.]

Said Dyson: "It's nice to see something that is not totally digital. That's what we (investors) want to see -- simple, low-cost applications of existing technology to empower citizens to make change."  Added Newmark: "This is like something out of a Cory Doctorow novel, about how the street finds its uses for technology." PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej waxed more philosophical. "There has always been the fear that the government would be Big Brother," he said, "but this (startup) is an example of how we are Big Brother; Big Brother is you."

For a video of the project, click here.

Other social start-ups of note featured at this year's PDF include:

* VoteiQ - a new social network that provides a virtual meeting place where voters can network with each other to decide who the best local candidates are in election -- or collaborate to back their own.

* Piryx - a social fundraising and compliance platform that helps organizations and nonprofits connect their donors online and organize them into fundraisers for the cause.

* PopRule - a new people-powered politics site crowdsources local coverage of politics, problems and solutions while creating issues-based groups to catalyze action in local communities.

* SeeClickFix - a new site that allows anyone to report and track non-emergency issues anywhere in the world via the Internet, empowering citizens, organizations and local governments with information about local problems and potential solutions in their neighborhoods.