The original meaning of the term ‘orientating' a map was to rotate it to show east (the ‘orient') at the top, in much the same way as most map-users today align their world maps to the north to ensure familiarity with their world-view. From the Western European perspective, that of this regular columnist, ‘east' could be defined to include all points from the longitude of Hamburg to that of Tokyo. Several ICA commissions and working groups have a natural affinity with Eastern Europe due to the presence of their chairs and active members, and this part of the world has proved fertile ground for cartographic activity and development over many decades. And although the month in which you read this column sees ICA meeting for a regular biennial conference in the ‘west' (our 24th International Cartographic Conference Santiago in Chile), we here briefly mark just a few of the many ICA events held in Eastern Europe throughout every month of 2009.

This year opened with a gathering of experts in the fields of risk planning and disaster management. The ICA Working Group ‘Cartography of Early Warning and Crisis Management', under the leadership of ICA past-president Prof. Milan Konecny, met in January in Prague (1) to address the state of the art in early warning and emergency management and to review tools, software, existing geo-information sources, organisational structures and methods for work in crisis situations.

The following month saw the first officially sanctioned ICA Regional Symposium on Cartography for Eastern and Central Europe, organised by ICA vice-president Georg Gartner and a committee of cartographers from Estonia, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Switzerland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia, Latvia, Turkey and Hungary (2).

The ICA Commission on Geo-visualisation met in Hamburg in March 2009 (3) for an advanced overview of contemporary technologies in the important area of cartographic and geographic visualisation, whilst April saw another ICA Commission, on Digital Technologies for Cartographic Heritage, present their 4th annual meeting in Venice (4).

Late June marked an opportunity for Russian cartography, in the person of Professor Vladimir Tikunov, chair of ICA Working Group on GIS and Sustainable Development, to organise for the fifteenth time the valuable InterCarto/InterGIS conference, this year in Perm. Early August saw the presentation of the 3rd ICA Workshop on Geospatial Analysis and Modelling in Gavle, Sweden (5) under the guidance of ICA Commission chair Professor Bin Jiang, whilst later in the month the First International Conference on 3D Maps was held in Dresden, organised by Manfred Buchroithner.

A report of the activities of the ICA Commission on Theoretical Cartography in Ukraine, Germany and Lithuania during 2009 will be published next month on this page. Eastern Europe has certainly featured prominently on the ICA map in 2009!