Advocacy mashups harness power of mapping

By mapping everything from crime statistics to strip clubs to the best cycling routes, modern-day Internet cartographers have also become lifestyle guides, giving strangers tips and advice once solicited from a friend or co-worker. Now, they’re also acting as advocates for the environment or the disenfranchised and hoping their interactive maps will inspire the casual Internet user to get involved.

Advocacy mashups are tackling the most vexing problems of our time, from New Orleans post-Katrina clean-up to the possibility that some 2,300 Islamic mosques and schools across the country pose a homegrown terror threat.

Capitalizing on a growing interest in politically or socially-aware mashups, like the map that used text, video and photos to reveal scenes of genocide in Darfur, Google recently introduced Google Earth Outreach, a new service aimed at non-profits and activists.

With Google Earth Outreach, the mapping process is simplified so that users can easily "illustrate and advocate" issues important to them. The company will also provide qualified non-profits with a license for Google Earth Pro, normally available for $400.  Google spent the last year testing the system with more than 100 organizations, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jane Goodall Institute. Users will receive step-by-step instructions on how to post videos, incorporate additional map layers, and connect with like-minded creators. 

Ed Wilson of Earthwatch Institute, an environmental group that has partnered with Google, said that the application has the ability to “shrink” the earth and provide an opportunity for hesitant users to explore a new issue 

"It's not just a [point] on a map,” he says. "It's a gateway."

The most technogically savvy mashups incorporate embedded video and wiki-style entries that any user can edit, making them into “mapumentaries,” user-generated maps with embedded video and wiki-style text entries. Consider them a tool for anyone — citizen journalists, activists and non-profits included — with a stake in a cause.

Early this year, Quintus Jett, a senior research fellow at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, took a team of students to map a New Orleans neighborhood that had experienced 80 percent flooding.

In Gentilly, once home to more than 40,000 residents, they began a door-to-door mapping of the recovery process and then plotted the information on a GIS map (http://icpd.dartmouth.edu/viewer.php). The power of the map, explained Quintus, was at least two-fold.

First, it dispelled impressions that the neighborhood had yet to recover — his data showed that 95 percent of Gentilly was on its way to recovery. Second, it demonstrated how average citizens could respond to an event like a natural disaster.

“More and more people are living in concentrated locations,” Jett said. “There is decaying public infrastructure, global climate change and the threat of global terror. When there’s a problem that occurs, why leave it to just the government? There is an emergency planner who is thinking about all these people as potential victims – I’m looking at them as potential responders.”

Jett was joined this spring by Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, and Bill Gannon, head of Web operations at LucasFilm. Gillmor and Gannon, who were co-teaching a class at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, had their students photograph more than 300 houses and interview about 40 locals, several of which were videotaped.

When the mashup debuts later this year on Platial, a mapping platform Web site, it will embody a mapumentary, a term coined by Platial's CEO Di-Ann Eisnor to describe the new wave of interactive maps.

“The goal is to create something that actually lets a community tell its own story,” Gillmor said.

While he is hopeful that mashups will mobilize people to generate their own local news and resources, Gillmor is still trying to resolve lingering questions about accuracy.

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