JeffreyBarke.net

via Donna Genzmer:

All right, this is what I like to see: power to the people, public participation style, open source applications! gCensus was built by a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University who was fed up with the slowly rendered, crappy display of the Census Bureau's online mapping interface. His question (our question): why can't people have access to dynamic, high-resolution maps without paying the ginormous bucks for professional GIS software? His answer: gCensus

It's "an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google's excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000's Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping."

Right now, though, gCensus is more proof-of-concept than ready-to-release application. It needs to integrate more datasets, and it would probably benefit from other eyes looking at the code. So, here's the flip side to radical democracy—with free software comes great responsibilities. "The student" is looking for development help and hardware and hosting donations. Contact him at gcensus [at] gmail [dot] com and let's make this happen!