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Google Earth Enterprise System

For past two years I’ve been a board member of the RPCV group Friends & RPCVs of Guyana (FROG) and as nonprofits go, it takes time to build up membership, fund raise, continue outreach and develop our programs but I’m confident that we’re progressing at a solid pace.

There’s plenty of room for FROG to grow and I’ve begun to spend more time thinking long-term about the future of our organization.

How can we make our work more sustainable?

How can we better integrate into the nonprofit community in Guyana?

How can this community effectively work together and share it’s collective resources?

Guyana is a small country but with a large number of NGOs, nonprofits, community groups, volunteers and activists operating within the country. At any one time, there are thousands of people on the ground planning, organizing, volunteering and working toward the collective goal of bettering people’s lives. Thinking of our work within this context keeps bringing me to the conclusion that we’re operating without the most basic tool, collaborative mapping.

Obviously it’s the responsibility of each organization to archive their activities and projects, successes and failures, resources on the ground, for the sake of organizational memory and building upon their work. But it’s the collective responsibility of the NGO community to share with each other what will ultimately benefit the people they’re serving.

One mapping tool that strikes me as incredibly powerful is the Google Earth Enterprise system. This system allows mapping and sharing large amounts and varying types of data sets for making better organizational decisions collaboratively.

How does this work?

Google Earth Enterprise helps organizations with imagery and other geospatial data make that information accessible and useful to all employees who need access via an intuitive, visual, and fast application. Visualize, explore and understand information on a fully interactive 3D globe or 2D browser based maps. Enable your workers to collaborate, improve decision-making, and take faster, more informed action based on geospatial information.

Using this system, organizations in Guyana will quickly learn where overlapping projects exists, where resources are lacking and where they are redundant, which villages volunteers should be sent and what they need to focus on while there. Organization can compare a wide range of data sets to draw conclusions that may have otherwise been missed. Combined with tools like FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD and Ushahidi, crisis management will be more effective. Local data sets combined with UN data, information from the World Bank and other sources will help both the NGO community and the Guyanese government with “big picture” planning and outreach.

As this system, and those like it, mature, there will continue to be success stories and wider implementation of mapping technologies. Long-term, I realize this idea may be bigger than FROGs capacity, but it’s a direction we’ll push for regardless.