In the last few years, mapping has become an increasingly important element among the winners of the Knight News Challenge. Five of the 12 projects which won grants in 2010 involved mapping in some form: TileMapping by DevelopmentSeed of Washington DC; CitySeed by Arizona State University’s New Media Innovation Lab in Phoenix; CityTracking by Stamen Design out of San Francisco;’GoMap Riga by two Latvians; and LocalWiki by the founders of Davis Wiki of Davis, California. In addition, a 2009 grantee, Ushahidi also made its reputation through crowd-sourced crisis mapping. Many of the projects out of’MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, a 2007 grantee, involve mapping, including Sourcemap and’Grassroots Mapping

As such, Knight Foundation will be a sponsor at the State of the Map conference in Girona, Spain, which is taking place from July 9 to 11, 2010. Jennifer 8. Lee, the lead Knight News Challenge reviewer, will be available at the conference to explain how to craft an effective proposal and to field questions. The News Challenge is interested in all layers of the map stack, including data gathering, tile rendering and interactive consumer-facing applications.

State of the Map is the largest annual event for Open Street Map, a collaborative project to create an open-source, editable map of the world. The data from Open Street Map is used in Flickr and other commercial applications. In addition, Open Street Map volunteers helped generate maps used by many response and relief organizations in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.