(photo by Area with only some street names)

I have been volunteering with the Haiti Ushahididi effort doing mapping of SMS and Twitter messages for help.  I also worked at Crisis Camp Boston on Saturday.  I'll write more about all of these but I think the most compelling thing I learned is:

Having your street name on a map on the internet can save your life.

Open Street Maps has been getting better and better for Haiti. On Saturday while the hackers were upstairs hacking Haitian volunteers were downstairs working to help identify street and place names to make the maps better.

There are places in the world without many computers or computer literate people, but I think there are very few places that haven't sent some of their young people into the cities where there are computers. If we could crowd source a large number of people making sure their parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and extended family. all had street and place names on the map we could add a lot of coverage.

I hope that Google and Open Street Maps will tell the world to Map thier Grandparents.  We need some media coverage on mapping saving lives and a publicized event to map more of the world.