I thought I'd post my responses to the NetSquared request for answers to 4 questions for a printable voter guide they are putting together next week.

This is for my project at: http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/your-mapper

1. In 200 characters or less, what’s your Mashup Challenge elevator pitch?

Your Mapper empowers individuals to browse and contribute hyper-local public information on interactive maps, like crime, pollution, accidents, violations, and anything in their neighborhood. We want to unlock public data and share it with your community.

2. Data sources. Please identify your data sources, noting:
a. if the data source is available
b. open and available
c. unavailable

Crime - available, but not always easy to get
Restaurant Health Inspections - available, but not always easy to get
Sex Offenders - usually open and available
Building / Zoning Permits / Violations - available, but not always easy to get
Home Property Values / Sales - available, but not always easy to get
Car Accident Reports - available, but not always easy to get
Structural Stability of Bridges - available and open
Historic Sites on the National Registry - available and open
Local Business Reviews / Ratings - available and open
Pollution Sources - available, but not always easy to get
Any other geographic based information that user contributors can obtain locally

3. Reference url’s:
Please provide us with 3 links that illustrate why this project has great potential for social impact.

1. www.metromapper.org - The current incarnation of Your Mapper, but it needs social aspects (comments, ratings, flagging), should be national in scope, allow for data user contributions, and methods for automatically collecting and paying revenue back to user contributors. Allowing the public access to this information would help to empower everyone.

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data - Why data should be open and accessable to all, including rights to data collected with public funds, benefits of open data, and . Your Mapper believes all non-restricted public data should be made easily available to the public, and allow organizations like Your Mapper to present the information in an easy to understand and useful manner.

3. www.helium.com - a site that shows a model for automatically collecting and paying revenue back to user contributors, based on how successful the contributions are. Helium uses written pieces as its valuable user contribution, but Your Mapper would use data for mapping instead. Experts contributing local information empowers the people that can use, share, and collaborate on it.

4. Project life cycle. We want to help separate apples from oranges this year. That is, we believe projects at the ‘concept’ level would benefit from being evaluated separately from projects that are much further along. To this end, please identify which phase you believe your project is in, as such:

I. Concept. You’ve got a vision, but you’re in need of help to turn that vision into a technical specification that will allow an engineer to build a mashup application.
II. Project Design Phase. Your vision is clear. You’re working on your specification, but you need the support of a product/project designer.
III. Hackable. Your project is spec’d out, and ready to be developed. You’d like to call in the engineers!

Stage III. Hackable. Metro Mapper is the working foundation for the Your Mapper project. Most of the backend functionality is built already, but it just needs to be improved, have layers added to it, and made public in re-branded internet-based services.