idealist.org

Mapping for Advocacy and Organizing

By Flickr user collective nouns
These recent updates to mapping and cartographic services struck me as incredibly powerful advocacy and organizing tools, a new approach to empowering communities, organizations and individuals to affect change at a grassroots level.

Earlier this week, the GeoCommons, a tool for visualizing geographic data, launched a tool that enables users to create maps from their own data sets. Their goal "is to push the boundaries of web mapping to provide easy to use and powerful cartographic design tools along with access to a huge amount of complex geospatial data."

Current services like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are quite limited in what they're capable of creating. GeoCommons has differentiated itself by designing an "understandable and accurate cartographic design interface," giving users more options for referencing existing data.

GeoCommons has also included the ability to export map data in a KML file, the accepted standard in online map creation. This enables the user to create a map in GeoCommons and then export the KML file into applications like Google Earth or NASAs WorldWind.

Combining publicly available data from sources like the U.S. government, the UN, the World Bank, and other outlets will allow nonprofits, businesses, individuals, and even social networks to efficiently target and coordinate a better plan of action for addressing various issues. Referencing campaigns and activities to varying data sets will allow for better decision making, allocation of resources, and course of action.

TacticalTech.org's Mapping for Advocacy is an approach for "[enabling] advocacy groups [to] explore and exploit the potential of maps to effectively send out their message." Tactical Tech recognizes the potential in using maps to visually represent data for affecting change. Here's an example: "The Darfur project undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) where mapping was used to expose a humanitarian crisis in Sudan is a prime example. Combining mapping and rich content, witness testimonies, satellite imagery, data and other information placed on a Google Earth map, the USHMM raised awareness of the reality of incidents in the Sudanese region." This is an interesting approach to solving a very serious issue, but only one example of using mapping.

What other examples can you think of? How can Idealist use maps? How would nonprofits be bettered served by integrating mapping into their own services? What opportunities would be presented using this technology? Any ideas?

This entry is by Scott S., our Experience Analyst.