collaborative cartography system

FROM: Chris Heathcote

What NEED does this meet?
Many projects based on real communities (and real life) need good high-quality geographic information. In the UK, this data is only available at a very high price through a few companies (notably the Ordanance Survey, Consignia). This takes mapping and geographical data out of the reach of many small community and non-profit projects.

Several of the project ideas already mentioned on mysociety require a good base map and additional data collection/local participation (e.g. CCTV map, Eyesore - and others such as openguides.org). My proposal is to build an extensible system that not only is a useful resource in itself, but acts as an enabler for many other projects, giving open free access to the data collected to other suitable organisations. So, the participants are people who want to engage between their environment and the collaborative system, but the real beneficiaries are the many projects that can benefit from such mapping and geographic information.

What is the APPROACH?
Collaborative cartography requires a structure to organise activity, prevent duplication and cross-check data quality.

I have outlined initial thoughts, on how to handle the scale of the problem, potential enabling projects, and participant organisation at
http://undergroundlondon.com/antimega/archives/000149.html .

Whilst this mainly talks about London, now is the time to think about ways to extend and plan the system to support anywhere where there are enough interested citizens to make it work.

Several other people have been thinging about collaborative cartography: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CcSemanticMappingWeek (with a specific mention for Jo Walsh, who has created several projects that start looking at this problem - http://space.frot.org/ )

What are the BENEFITS to people?
The benefit is subtle but with huge implications. Geographically-organised campaigns become trivial to start. Civic projects become location aware, and more user centric. Projects that could not even be considered due to cost implications can now be started. Good geographic information is a key enabler for true social software - projects that talk about your local society and let you engage with it on a completely equal footing.

What is the COMPETITION?
The biggest competition would be if the OS waved their magic wand and released a subset of their data under a free-for-non-profit licence. Any data like this would be rolled into (and benefit) the system. The system is more than just geopgraphy, as the participants will also be collecting other useful data, such as streetfront photos, wi-fi access points, mobile phone cell IDs, and any other social information that would be useful for a project.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
The hard bit is creating the database and front-end system, and keeping interest alive (until the community has enough momentum to carry on regardless).

Some people have created some exploratory code to test some of the programmatic concepts: http://the.earth.li/~kake/cgi-bin/mapping-simple/index.cgi .

It would be worthwhile doing research into how others use the free geopgraphical information available (such as in the US - wi-fi mapping and planning, MYC cell phone quality map), how to make it more useful, and what input and output mechanisms would benefit such projects.

There's nothing that hard in the system, but there's quite a lot of it, and potentially a lot of data to store and search.

From a participant point of view, we could conscript contributors from projects that would benefit from this information (such as openguides.org) to beta and seed the project.