We Can All Now Be Mappers

Why Maps?

Maps are important. Using a specialist system of symbols and design conventions they can cram an awful lot of information into a small space and are probably the most efficient way we have of presenting data about the world around us on a piece of paper or computer screen which people can understand with a little bit of training.

They are used by a myriad of organisations, groups of people and individuals and have become institutionalised into our culture. They are used extensively by Government bodies such as planning authorities, environmental agencies, police and defence departments, transport, and logistics… the list goes on. They form part of a specialist language used by professionals in these organisations to help them with their activities whether its strategic planning, resource allocation, monitoring and evaluation, environmental protection, routine management and administration, or intelligence gathering and knowledge creation.

Maps’ unique input into this professional lexicon is that they are the language of places and spaces – how places are similar, how places are different, whether they are better or worse on a particular metric, and how and why they are changing over time. Hence, they have a special position and special function which makes them powerful tools in decision-making. Maps are also very seductive in that they seem scientific and authoritative; the information they present are often treated as inherently truthful – accurately representing the real-world in miniature and are often not as scrutinised to the same degree as other methods of presenting data. Traditionally they have been compiled and drawn by map-making professionals acting for large, powerful organisations, such as national Governments, and this has helped legitimate the accuracy and ‘truthfulness’ of maps and the world they represent.

Is Digital Mapping Disruptive?

So… why this introduction to Mapping 101, Scott? Because things are changing - rapidly - in this world of maps, map-making and decision-making, and the Public Map Platform project is firmly rooted in the centre of these changes. The first big change came with the advent of Google Earth and Google Maps over 25 years ago leading to a fundamental shift in who can map and how we use maps. Maps are now pervasive like never before – we routinely carry them on our phones in our pockets and we use them to organise our everyday lives, quite often without realising it.

The other big, related change is the digital revolution and the emergence of open-source data and resources which have the potential to empower and enable people and communities to create their own maps and distribute them widely at very little cost.

These two big changes have the potential to fundamentally challenge and disrupt the traditional position and role that maps have in formal decision making by Government and other organisations. It can do this by allowing individual and communities to create their own maps of where they live, work, and play which better reflects their own lives and lived experiences and, crucially, capture the specialist, tacit and privileged knowledges that come from living in these places which are often missing from the maps used by Government and other bodies. And because these digital tools and data enable community maps to follow the same cartographic and design conventions as traditional maps, they have the capacity to speak the same specialist language and hence can become part of the professional lexicon of decision-making about places and spaces but using different and distinct voices.

We all have the power to map, but most of us don’t!

This is all very exciting and positive and something which has been discussed and desired for a long time in planning and policy circles. BUT… the word ‘potential’ in the previous paragraph is doing a lot of heavy lifting! It’s not enough for these open-data and digital technologies to simply exist for people and communities to use them to make effective and informative maps which challenge and disrupt the official view of the world and become a formal part of the decision-making process. We need work to understand if and how people can use digital resources to map their own places, identify the barriers and opportunities which can prevent and enable them to do so, and create free and easy to use resources to allow this to happen. And this is the nub of the Public Map Platform project.

My role is to lead the digital team on creating and curating these digital resources and collate and catalogue the repositories of open-data about Ynys Môn. This includes identifying, building, and deploying digital tools that allow the collection of mapping data in an intuitive and easy way, using existing software and devices where possible.

We have adopted OpenStreetMap (OSM) as our mapping framework – a British invention and ‘the Wikipedia of Maps’ which follows a truly open, collaborative and community approach to mapping. The OSM ecosystem includes a web platform and a smartphone app for mapping communities remotely and in the field. Updates are instantaneous and there is a real emphasis on mapping features and collecting detailed data on hyper-local community assets.

We are using uMap, a free to use front-end to OSM, that allows people to create map mashups by adding their own data to an OSM map base. This includes links to multi-media data such as their own photos and videos of their communities as well as those found online such as on WikiMedia. We are using Kobo, a free social survey tool which allows surveys to be co-produced with local communities and the data collected to be geolocated and mapped when in the field. We are also building our own software which will help synthesise data from these different data capture tools. Crucially, this will include the Public Map Platform itself – an innovative mapping platform that will bring all these data together – from OSM, from uMap, from Kobo, from Data Map Wales, from Cyngor Ynys Môn, from Natural Resources Wales and other data custodians, and from the various activities we are doing in schools, the Lle Llais events, local communities etc – into a single place for interrogation and display using new types of symbology and cartographic designs.

Integral to the platform will be training and learning resources to instruct and guide people in how to collect their own data and make their own maps. Some of these resources are already being trialled and tested by our community mappers within the field. So, is the project ambitious? YES! Is it easy? NO! It is early days, and we are still discovering the opportunities and challenges of working with the digital tools in making community maps. We will know better in the autumn after the summer of intensive data collection is over. At which point I’ll be back with an update on how things are going with all things digital mapping. Wish me luck!