Azavea’s Summer of Maps Fellowship Program

Posted by on February 03, 2014

Now in its third year, Azavea’s Summer of Maps program is open for applications, and we’re inviting your organization to participate. Summer of Maps offers fellowships to students to perform geographic data (GIS) analysis and visualization for non-profit organizations, for free. You have until Friday, February 9 to tell us about your project. If you are selected, a talented GIS student will work with our mentors to implement your project over a three-month period this summer.

What do I mean by “geographic data analysis and visualization”? Here are a few examples:

Arts – analyze geographic location of ticket sales and donations to both identify existing clusters and untapped markets
Environment – analyze the urban tree canopy and existing development to make a recommendation for future preservation
Food – develop three potential sites for a new soup kitchen and perform a market analysis to determine how each will affect existing sites
Housing – analyze housing needs to determine the best site for a new low income housing development
Land and water – identify a green infrastructure plan that maximizes impact of stormwater management
Transportation – identify the next 10 streets for the addition of bike lanes by scoring all street segments based on a variety of geographic criteria
Open Government – identify the sources of campaign contributions and measure the influence they have on the national political landscape

To provide some help, we’ve assembled a few samples from among the 2013 proposals.

There are more notes available with the online (and fairly short) application that can be found at http://www.summerofmaps.com. The deadline is Sunday, February 9, 2014.