I got to the OpenStreetMap presentation a bit late so this blog post is a little cruddy, well more cruddy than the previous posts at least.   Here are my notes:

Roads are two way for israeli's but one way for palestinian.   How do you represent that in a database?

About a year ago, there was no map of Palestine.   No decent maps of Gaza as of Jan 2009.

To handle Gaza, had Yahoo sat imagery and could trace major points.   Pointed out to BBC that their map during the Jan 2009 Incursion into Gaza was wrong.   In 7 days, they had maps of Gaza.   Purchased sat imagery at 30m resolution, 5,000 Gbp.

In the future, they want to develop nationalized routing system.   For example, you can choose if you are Israeli or Palestinian and the map would suggest the best route.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team(H.O.T) - unites U.N., NGO's, and OpenStreetMap.  

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/wikiProject_Palestine
http://jumpstart-mapping.blogspot.com/
http://brainoff.com/weblog/index.php?s=gaza+openstreetmap

Reading material: Introduction to NeoGeography