So much geospatial data, so little time (to save the Earth). Mashups to the rescue?

Here at Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Camp veteran Brian Hamlin is demonstrating that his interest in saving the planet is no flash in the pan. At previous mashup camps, Hamlin demonstrated a mashup that used Google Maps to plot the location of special recycling facilities that handle electronic waste (a.k.a. e-waste). Old computers, for example, should be processed by an e-waste facility rather than tossed in the garbage. Perhaps proving that he was ahead of his time in terms of being a green thinker, back at the first Mashup Camp in February 2006, Hamlin was the only developer showing such "green" mashups.

At this fourth Mashup Camp however, Hamlin has moved beyond showing his own green mashups and is talking about how he can enable the developers of others. According to Hamlin, the amount of geospatial data that's publicly available -- data that when creatively mashed could motivate non-green thinkers to start thinking green -- is like a swelling ocean of information that's just waiting to be mined by the right developers. The problem however is that there's no central directory where developers can go to learn about all those sources of data and how to access those sources in their mashups.

Enter Brian Hamlin. For his next trick, Hamlin has started a wiki specifically for that purpose and, in the above video, he tells me more about it and what seems like a one-developer crusade to save the Earth through software.