For the last two summers I have been interning for IBM in Westchester county, NY. While here, I’ve met a very wide distribution of interesting people (distributed across many axes, one of which is geographic – well, perhaps two of them ;). I think the community that we have formed is interesting for a number of reasons: One, as I have already mentioned, we are widely distributed across the globe; I think we are also likely to appear in each-other’s lives again, irrespective of our personal ties and attempts. There is no accident that we are a community – IBM already filtered us, and we all have a deeply rooted interest in technology. I fully expect (and hope!) to randomly run into interns from IBM in the years to come, simply because we walk similar lives in a relatively small global community of researchers. Everyone I have met has also proven to be extremely interesting, artistic and inventive.

The problem, then, is that we don’t have an easy way to interact outside of IBM. Currently, we are only connected by an email list that doesn’t serve as a very precise means of communication. As an example: Earlier this year, my partner and I drove across the United States, and we didn’t have anything planned for the night we would be in Pennsylvania. Eventually, I sent an email to the interns list asking simply “is anyone in Pennsylvania? (or do you know if there is anything to do there?)”. This just seemed crude, although it would have worked if I had tried it sooner. It would have been nice to have some idea of who may be there, and where about they were. This need not be accurate, the granularity of cities would be fine, it would still help with trip planning. (Apologies if you were expecting something profound, this is all I’ve got today.)

Today, out of the blue I realized how to do this, with the Google Maps API. If you aren’t familiar with the API, it lets you use the same technology on http://maps.google.com but with your own markers or whatever you want (within reason). You also get the scrolling / zooming and satellite imagery as well. I’d like to use this to map interns. The implementation would be pretty straightforward, but the privacy / legal implications aren’t clear-cut. Ideally, intern marks would have actual street addresses (and potentially other contact info as well), or at least mailing addresses associated with them. Common sense dictates that such a page should be private, and the Google terms of service supports this, after a manner:

“We also want to respect people’s privacy, so the API should not be used to identify private information about private individuals.”

An opt-in policy or click-through would probably remedy this, but I’m also not clear on whether Google is happy with a Google map being password-protected. The answers to this aren’t very pressing – I have a number of projects on my stack that need work first, but if anyone has input, I’d like to hear it :)