There were over 30 people at the Lima, Peru Drupal meetup this weekend, where I had the chance to present on mapping in Drupal. Specifically I talked about our open source MapBox service and how its custom maps can be used on Drupal websites, and on how maps like these are used on Managing News, our Drupal based news and data aggregator.

Jeff Warren from MIT Media Lab’s Design Ecology group also talked about mapping at the meetup, explaining how to make maps of areas that haven’t yet been mapped and how to do this without access to a satellite. Jeff is currently working on a Grassroots Mapping project in the informal settlement of Villa El Salvador in the Southern cone of Lima, where he’s working with the community to create maps using aerial photography to be used for planning and development purposes. Conventional methods can be prohibitively expensive, whereby grassroots methods can achieve the same result for a much lower cost.

Jeff talked about some of his mapping techniques on Saturday, and then demonstrated them on Sunday. A small group of us went out to the coastline of Lima and launched kites above the shore cliffs, several hundred feet above land. The kites lift a camera that’s been programmed to take a photo every ten seconds. Once the photographs have been taken, they can be rectified, meshed together, and converted into a format that can be used in GIS stacks to, in the end, give you a shape file or a printed map.

It was awesome to try out Jeff’s mapping techniques, and I’m excited to see what comes from the Grassroots Mapping project.