I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about gis and mapping with drupal, recently. I’ve never used drupal to manage a gis system before - only done it with Plone and from-scratch one-offs. Track my progress at <a href=”http://map.archi.st”>map.archi.st</a>
I see a lot of need in Detroit for accessible and customizable geographic databases, especially for community groups working in far-flung hoods. The <a href=”http://www.detroitagriculture.org”>Detroit Agricultural Network</a> is a perfect example of this: they support tons of gardens all over the place, and many people may not even know that there’s a community garden only a few blocks away from their house or workplace. Just gotta hook whatever systems up to a shortcode sms gateway….
A good lay-of-the-land overview of drupal gis can be found in <a href=”http://lullabot.com/drupal-voices/drupal-voices-67-eric-gundersen-mapping-open-source-government-and-features”>this Lullabot podcast</a>
Looks like the Chicago Tech Collective is involved in some drupal gis module development. Here’s one of the projects that resulted: <a href=”http://chicagoancestors.org/“>a Chicago library site </a>with a bunch of different datasources squeed into one somewhat useful interface. Novel!