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Last week I attended the workshop “Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This was my first meeting I have attended that was fully dedicated to the discussion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Lea Shanley, director of the Commons Lab, brought together top-notch panelists (see agenda) from government, university and industry. A great variety of topics were discussed, including the lack of privacy policy, simple tools to deal with information security (e.g. SSL – Secure Sockets Layer), and recommendations to make crowd sourcing successful.