As I proposed in one of my columns, companies with deep mapping experience like Google could relatively easily write “clean room” software that would map districts based ONLY on population, political boundaries (e.g. state lines), and major physical features (e.g. rivers).

The foundation units within each district could be either census blocks or the nine-digit zip codes. If the governor of CA, for example, asked Page and Brin to do that as a public service, I wonder if they would. I suspect that half a dozen engineers could have an Alpha version of such software working in under a month.