Over the past year, various Web 2.0 technology platforms have begun to provide its users with the ability to connect content they have created with a location, thus enabling not only keyword searches but location-based searches.   This experience has been further enhanced through geoRSS feeds and geotags which integrate technologies such as Twitter and Flickr with online mapping sites such as Google and Yahoo Maps.

Never before have citizen cartographers had such easy-to-use tools at their disposal to create meaningful maps that reflect not only the way they perceive their environments. Additionally, citizen cartographers are now able to share with others both inside and outside of their communities a much more nuanced view of their world through sight and sound.  In short, the map is in the hands of the masses and the opportunities for gaining new insight into place and space have never been more exciting. Further, the ever growing Web 2.0 technologies situated around online maps have  enabled people to develop online communities based on a share interested in geography and have brought to the forefront of the importance of understanding geography.

Citizen cartographers have used these new technologies to become empowered in times of crisis,  banding together to use online mapping tools and associated Web 2.0 content as a portal to organizing vast amounts of information from otherwise isolated areas. The 2007 California wildfires saw citizen cartographers taking their on-the-ground experience with the fires and sharing it virtually through Twitter, photo-sharing, and Youtube to the outside world as well as those isolated by the fires in their own communities. The 2008 Floods in the Midwest have seen the power of the map in a time of crisis, with organizations like the Red Cross using these Web 2.0 and mapping tools to send and receive information in the flood affected areas.

This growing movement shows the power of grassroots mapping to provide both a micro and macro experience of a vast crisis that assists not only neighbors but increases the knowledge base of those responding to the natural disaster.It is this grassroots effort coupled with technologies that hold promise for developing new and meaningful ways to respond to large scale crisis. It also serves to refocus the lenses of the discipline of geography and provides a unique opportunity to learn from and critically engage this exploding technology.

Geographers have much to offer in this new space of citizen cartography. As these technologies grow and becomes more and more ubiquitous there are substantial questions we must ask.

While we have seen an explosion of citizen cartographers actively contributing to grassroots mapping there is also a different map that is emerging that we must engage and critique. As web technologies enable and encourage location-based tagging and location-based searches,  we must begin to question and understand the long-term consequences of the electronic footprint being created by and about individuals, both intentional and unintentional.

How is the online electronic footprint becoming the unintentional electronic map, especially as  the roll-out of technologies that take advantage of GPS-enabled mobile phones  make tagging location seamless and more and more invisible to the user? How will governments and industry seek to use these electronic maps in the future? What are the ultimate implications for the growing level of transparency both intentional and unintentional?

Finally, an important tenet of web 2.0 is user-generated content which requires a level of computer literacy and technology access that vast sections of the population still lack. Will the those citizen cartographers who map and describe their own communities bring attention and resources their way for simply placing it on the map? Will communities forfeit resources and lose even more visibility in an online world because they lack the resources necessary to reestablish their communities on the virtual map? These are questions are where geographers have much to offer citizen cartographers.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University
June 30, 2008