This weekend CrisisCamp is coming to Washington, DC to advance the conversation around how technology can be best used to improve how we respond to disasters and other humanitarian crises.

Eric, Robert, and Tom will be there from Development Seed and are excited to dive into the conversation, hear how people are using technology in disaster scenarios, find out what works and what doesn’t, and learn what needs still need to be met. We’re particularly interested in learning what information and data first responders still need. Recently, we’ve done a lot of work to make maps and government data more open and accessible, by getting US TIGER data hosted in Amazon’s cloud and road map data from several African countries up on Open Street Map, and we’d love to find out what other information first responders need.

CrisisCamp is set up BarCamp style, and Robert is hoping to lead a session on some of what we’ve been working on, specifically on how to integrate Drupal with open source GIS tools. In this talk, he’ll show some examples of Drupal sites that leverage PostGIS, Mapnik, OpenLayers, GeoRSS, and Amazon Cloud Storage that give distributed teams flexible ways of creating and sharing maps.

If you’ll be at CrisisCamp, be sure to say hi to Eric, Robert, and Tom, and if not, you can follow the action on Twitter at #crisiscamp.