Create Awesome Ward Maps using Google Maps

7 Jan

Google Maps has long been one of my favorite tools. They have an awesome API that allows you to create all sorts of great mashups. Within the church there has been a lot of talk about using google maps (and other online mapping services) to create ward maps.

Ward Uses

A couple of good uses come to mind. Creating a more effective home teaching route. Planning for emergency situations in the area. Helping members get acquainted and find those that live close to one another.

Techie Efforts to make this Happen

There has been quite a few efforts to make this type of thing happen within the church and the greater church techie community. Here is an extended discussion about this effort.

One brother created an awesome mapping tool that allows you to import your ward directory from LDS.org website and see all the members of the ward on a map. Here are a couple of the screenshots.

Unfortunately, the project was stopped for security reasons. The data was hosted on a server instead of locally, but the church is working on something like this as well.

Greasemonkey Script

Until that comes out, here is a greasemonkey script that allows you to log into the ward website and see a link to a google map for each person listed on the ward directory.

Others?

I’m sure there are other ones out there. Has anyone figured out a way to create a local copy of a ward map? It doesn’t have to been seen by everyone in the ward, but would be really useful for the leadership of the ward… ideas?

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6 Responses for "Create Awesome Ward Maps using Google Maps"

Darrell January 7th, 2008 at 1:49 pm 1
Download the .csv table from the LDS website and then reformat it in Excel. Then upload here:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

Then download the KML file and upload to Google Earth or possibly Google Maps. Make the map share-able and voila!
Jeff January 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm 2
Awesome find Darell. I was able to download my .csv. I had to play with the the excel table and try several different things. The one that worked best was three different columns (one for name, one for 1st part of address, and 1 for second part).

I then downloaded the .kml file and tried to upload it using the MyMaps function of GoogleMaps. It kept bringing up an error so I FTP’d it online and used the “import from URL” function. It worked great. I made sure it was unlisted and then embedded the map on a password protected webpage for the ward leadership.

The final product has a dot on every name (a couple of strange mappings, but for around 220 families, not bad). When you click the dot you get their full name and address. I deleted the phone column in my excel sheet, but next time I think I will put it back in for easy information retrieval.

Thanks again! Awesome!
MormonTechie.com : Blog Archive : Google Maps Layers - My Maps for Buildings and Temples? January 16th, 2008 at 9:46 am 3
[...] posted a similar entry last week about mapping the ward membership and received a good tip from Darrell. I followed [...]
Mark Maloy June 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm 4
I mapped out our ward list using the CSV file from our ward’s website, and using the batchgeocode tool, uploaded to google earth saved a KML file which uploaded to a unshared google map.

Last Name, First Name(s), address, city, state, zip, phone, email 1, email 2 are the fields that I mapped. It works well.

Let me know if you would like the URL or any help.
Darrell August 18th, 2008 at 9:12 am 5
Here’s an easier way to do it.
Darrell August 18th, 2008 at 9:13 am 6
Here’s an easier way to do it:

http://mapalist.com/