Time has blown by at a record pace.
Really. I don’t know what has happened to July, August, and September, but suddenly it is October, with just two months left in the BETA.

One of the things we were most excited about at boot camp was the possibility of a GIS (Geographic Information System) Mapping project that would reveal community resources.

I was reminded of the potential and possibility for GIS Maps after seeing this flickr pool of community maps, divided by race.

In this case, the map serves as a visual representation of segregation in U.S. Cities.

The project was created by Eric Fischer, who was inspired by a similar map done revealing the demographic divides in Chicago.  Fischer used census data to map where different people lived and categorized all the people by race. The results are instantly illuminating.

The map illustrating this post is of Washington, DC. To represent the races, Fischer used this coding system:

Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people.

You can see that most populations are tightly clustered – there is a lot less racial mixing than people think.  Other cities reveal similar dynamics.

Here is New York City:

And here is Los Angeles:

Here is Chicago:

This is Houston:

This is Detroit:

And this one represents New Orleans:

Just the sheer visual is amazing enough – but what if we could layer these maps with more information? What if, with just a click, you could see areas of low and high income, and how that broke out along racial and ethnic lines? Or click to see public resources? Unfortunately, creating a good map takes weeks of number crunching and designs. Even if we have the data, would it be possible for us to put it all together before December?