I stumbled across OpenPlanning.org yesterday and a blog post that discussed the use of GIS as a testbed for open source planning principals. The overall goal of the group is to forge ideas for large-scale rapid responses to massive scale climate change. This is a proactive approach to consider the dramatic coastal changes and other impacts that may impact due to dramatic shifts in climate.
“The Collaborative isn’t about pushing open source GIS software – though, there’s some cool stuff that should definitely get included on any disc. It’s not about creating a new organization either. Instead, it’s about energizing existing systems to build a network of people and resources and data, to demonstrate how collaborative and open planning methods can be beneficial to everybody involved – for our short term and long term goals.”
The group is particularly interested in creating a “GIS disc” that would encapsulate large quantities of data and tools in order to test their planning hypotheses in a virtual laboratory.
“GIS in a box (or disc) provides a suite of tools for getting going: open source tools, demos of commercial packages, data viewers and converters, tutorials, NYC map templates, public datasets, links to data repositories…”
If you’ve got any tips or resources for them, I’m sure they’d be interested in hearing from you.
