Submitted by Alyssa Wright on February 12, 2009 - 9:18am.
For lack of GOP message guru Frank Lutz, it was a project with no name. And yet it was one of the (many) precedents set during an historic election. Commissioned by Obama for America campaign, GIS consultant Karsten Vennemann used opensource components, including OpenLayers, to map voter registration in battleground states. By combining millions of public voting records with daily updates from on-the-ground troops, these interactive map helped organizers priori to map voter registration in battleground states. By combining millions of public voting records with daily updates from on-the-ground troops, these interactive map helped organizers prioritize canvassing efforts. Used in about 12 battleground states, the opensource maps proved to be a progressive tool in an already progressive campaign.
In the wake of an ESRI proposal for NationalGIS, we take a moment to reflect on how and why opensource components came to be part of the Obama mapping stack.
