Tonight Tom MacWright will lead an ignite talk on how open data can be made more usable, and he'll show how we did this with TIGER mapping data - which includes shape files of school districts, voting districts, county boundaries, and more - by hosting it in Amazon's cloud - rather than relying on the slow and clunky infrastructure it was on. Tom blogged about this here as it pertains to a website we built displaying data on school districts in the United States, and tonight will talk about how having access to this data and more can improve the tools and information collection for disaster response. For a preview of the talk, check out Tom's slides: Tom's talk is one of twenty talks that will be given at the kickoff event for CrisisCamp. It will be speed demoing for disaster response tech and at the very least a thorough crash course, as all the talks will show examples of how technology can improve disaster relief - in five minutes or less. Space is still available, but Eric, Robert, and of course Tom - be sure to say hello if you attend.