Whether it's community members participating in mapping parties led by organizations like OpenStreetMap or high schools including local geography and GIS training in their curriculum, a network of folks that have a well rounded understanding of the local geography and infrastructure is invaluable in a crisis situation.

Local knowledge by cyclists, armchair community planners, birders, runners, rock hunters, community activists, geo-cachers, commuters, boy and girl scouts, and others becomes valuable when brought together. Bind together these local "experts" with a little education provide by couple of map geeks, and a hyper-local, very rich online map of a community can develop, one that compliments those created by the professionals at FEMA and other federal and local agencies. We've seen the value of community created maps like OpenStreetMap demonstrated when rendering aid in the direct aftermath and recovery of international crises like Haiti.

So get folks outside to discover and map their neighborhood. There are two end results: a diverse and distributed network of people with a strong understanding of the local terrain and infrastructure, plus an open and freely available map created by the real experts -- the folks that actually live in the community.