Last month’s first-ever mapathon hosted by the White House brought people together from across the public and private sectors to celebrate and work in real-time on exciting crowd-sourced mapping projects currently underway in the federal government.  In case you’re not familiar with the term – a mapathon is a coordinated event designed to jumpstart the creation of new, innovative maps that will benefit communities. Open Mapping, which is a growing innovation movement that is transforming the relationship between the government and the public, supports economic development, innovation, and community resilience.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability’s (OE) mapping of public outage information was one of three projects featured during last month’s event. This data set will allow disaster-impacted residents, tourists, first responders, and relief volunteers to easily connect to their local electricity provider to get information about the scope and estimated restoration time of the outage. We were thrilled to have OE interns Jeremy Call and Henry Puppe – both military veterans who are using their GI Bill benefits to study geography at George Mason University – supporting this event as they kick off their work on this high value data set. During the mapathon, attendees joined us in starting to build a data set of online outage map URLs, main website URLs, 1-800 numbers, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages of the nation’s approximately 3,000 utilities, munis, and electric co-ops.  For two hours, 30 people chipped away at the 15,000+ pieces of data that will make up the power outage information database, using OpenEI, a free and open knowledge sharing platform created by the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Other attendees helped map data for the State Department’s MapGive program that supports humanitarian efforts in the Nepal earthquake response and other parts of the world, and the Interior Department’s Every Kid in a Park initiative that encourages children to explore the nation’s public parks, lands, and waters.

I’m excited we got such a great start last month on creating the power outage database. For me, this work is personal, having been without power in New Orleans for six months after Katrina. Through that and other severe weather experiences, I know what it’s like to try to make a plan to keep your family safe and less miserable in an impacted area and how important it is to have current information about vital services such as electricity.

We are on track to have the database completed by the end of the summer. The data will be available via an open application programming interface (API) that will make it easier for organizations such as the Red Cross to tap into it with their own applications to get the best information on power outage information sources.  Empowering our citizens, first responders, and others with this kind of information will help communities become more resilient and speaks to the power of open data.

Denice Ross is a Round 3 Presidential Innovation Fellow working in OE’s Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration Division.