One of the things discussed at the iDiplomacy symposium last week was the crowdsourcing and democratization of map making. In some countries where there are few maps available companies like Google have been able to rely on local knowledge to produce maps that are more complete and accurate than professionally created ones.

The New York Times has an interesting article that talks about the growing involvement of the public in the development in online maps:
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Facebook has a new portal at peace.facebook.com, which tracks the friend connections made each day by people of different countries, religions and political affiliations. TechCrunch has a write up here:

“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”

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