Evaluating Participatory Mapping Software
Highlights
- PM and PGIS both draw from the theoretical frameworks of Participatory Action Research (PAR) in international development. PAR is an approach to inquiry which dates to the 1940s and involves researchers and participants working together to understand a problem and find a solution. There are many definitions of this approach, which normally share common elements. PAR specifically focuses on social change that promotes democracy and challenges inequity in all its forms (View Highlight)
- In this vision, the non-authoritative sources of spatial information and knowledge of citizens are considered to have special value and are prioritised. This is a way of privileging ‘non-authoritative sources of information,’ i.e., the knowledge of citizens or the ordinary people. The local spatial knowledge of ordinary people relates to most elements of their lives and places as well as their livelihoods, landscapes, territories, resource management, risks, security, conflicts, etc. (View Highlight)
- To date, there is no comprehensive guide to selecting geospatial software for PM. This makes it incredibly difficult for users to choose the appropriate software for their project given the diversity of internal and external needs and factors. Investing in any specific application can have serious financial implications and might increase negative perceptions of the PM process if decided on too hastily. (View Highlight)
New highlights added May 18, 2024 at 4:20 PM
- Before the 1990s, GIS was mostly utilized by governments, including the military, private interests to monitor local populations, evaluate strategic resources, and monitor environmental changes. Early GIS software could only be used by technical experts who received extensive training. Due to their specialized knowledge, these experts often held an almost monopoly of decision-making power on the methods used to collect, manage, and analyze spatial data. The users would rarely gather input in a collaborative or participatory manner from the public, and the results were rarely subjected to local public scrutiny (Burnett, 2022). (View Highlight)
- Although this volume reviews to nine software, the International Society for Participatory Mapping (ISPM) has identified twenty-two software tools (see Table 1.1) that are useful for PM: ten mapping applications, seven surveying and crowdsourcing tools, and five mapping management systems that were designed for group participation and planning (ISPM, 2020). (View Highlight)
- Data sovereignty and data confidentiality are the most significant ethical issues in PM. Practitioners must ask themselves who owns the data after their collection. Will the data collected fall into the wrong hands to be exploited by private or government organizations? Do the spatial data have the potential to do harm later (View Highlight)
- Sociocultural and contextual differences have a strong impact on the perceptions of data sensitivity. Since the PM of indigenous lands and resources is increasingly seen as a precondition for securing legal recognition of indigenous land rights, sensitive traditional and local knowledge are being extracted. Increasingly, data are collected via multimodal sensors on mobile phones. A typical participatory sensing application operates in a centralized fashion (i.e., the sensor data collected by the phones of volunteers are reported to a central server for processing) (Christin et al., 2011). Who collects, analyzes, and stores the data is extremely political. (View Highlight)
- Such applications still require users to download a copy of the data and upload it into a third-party system, such as QGIS or Carto, to conduct queries and reasoning, measurements, transformations, descriptive summaries, optimization, and hypothesis testing. This process requires the data to pass through multiple platforms, computers, and hands to conduct the analysis, and moves stakeholders further away from the process. (View Highlight)
- Even though participatory applications have become more widespread, and computers are becoming more affordable and user-friendly, it is still difficult for many community-based organizations to afford to recruit experts to implement, maintain, and sustain high-tech solutions (Rambaldi et al., 2006b). A lack of accessibility to the technology leads to biases that can alter the outcome of a PM process as well as the long-term sustainability of any proposed solutions (Brown, 2017). The (View Highlight)
- Standard GIS has a natural inclination towards positional precision (that is often a false precision), vis-à-vis representational accuracy (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Elwood, 2008; McCall, 2006). (View Highlight)
- Mapbox is an excellent solution to consider when looking for participatory mapping tools, mainly when: data is already gathered, and an engaging presentation is needed; a highly customized application with dynamic interaction is required; there are large datasets that need to be displayed; the single stakeholder will create data and when there is limited GIS knowledge (View Highlight)
- Mapbox Terms of Service (TOS) declare that all legal rights to the uploaded content remain with the user. (View Highlight)
- Mapbox also supports customers who are building applications for users in low-bandwidth environments where data is precious (View Highlight)
- The Community team has built many long-standing relationships with organizations active in participatory mapping and indigenous mapping. The Community team provides tailored support, discounted and donated products, pro bono volunteer time, and access to specialized tools or account permissions (such as approval to side-load map tiles between devices in limited, non-commercial cases when mapping offline in remote or rural environments). (View Highlight)
- The use of vector tilesets and open web standards like GeoJSON means that in most cases any user of the map can gain access to the data using developer tools provided by a browser. This is a great advantage when it comes to web application design, but it also means that additional care needs to be taken when selecting what kind of data and on what level of granularity are needed. (View Highlight)
- Due to the use of open standards across the platform, together with other open formats such as GeoJSON, export and import of data in Mapbox is unhindered. (View Highlight)
- While older versions of Mapbox tools do allow self-hosting of JavaScript libraries, styles, and map tiles and therefore to create offline applications, newer versions require access tokens to access Mapbox services. The dependency on access to the internet limits the ability to deploy systems built with the newer versions of Mapbox GL JS in situations where connectivity can pose a problem. (View Highlight)
- The Mapeo Desktop app is used to organize data collected on mobile or GPS, to create new GIS data, and to visualize, edit data, create printed reports, and publish a map online. The Mapeo toolkit was developed within a strong values framework, to center the needs and priorities of local land defenders. The authors found Mapeo’s strengths to be prioritization of features promoting data privacy and data sovereignty such as being offline first and not dependent on a server (View Highlight)
- The term of solidarity technology is used to characterize both the development process itself, and the tool as an active object in the world (McKelvey, 2020). Technologists wishing to develop within a similar value system can follow Dd’s recommendations on Table 3.1. (View Highlight)
- as technology complexity increases, community access to the technology decreases (View Highlight)
- Mapeo is built using peer-to-peer technology which does not use a server to store data and functions, it is completely offline. The entire data set is stored on each device (mobile or desktop) and they are synchronized to share data. Data (View Highlight)
- However, participants mentioned that GPS accuracy declined significantly (15–20 m) when collecting observation points in remote areas with low internet connectivity (as the GPS can improve accuracy if able to go online). Users have also related that the accuracy can be hard to get high in areas of high forest cover, or in deep ravines, where lines of sight to satellites are blocked. In such cases, as mentioned in Sect. 3.2 on Ethics (p. 43), buying a portable GPS to collect coordinates and then enter these coordinates in Mapeo through the manual entry screen, would increase accuracy if this is deemed important (View Highlight)
- MD has a variety of online background maps available whose accuracy and coverage may vary depending on the region under study. For instance, in southern Mexico, Bing, Esri, and Mapbox services provide 25 m satellite images, allowing communities to map all the places and resources they want. However, these are only available when online, and users without capacity to create their own offline maps, could suffer if using in areas with low internet connectivity due to the undetailed nature of the default offline map which comes with Mapeo. (View Highlight)
- Most data collected within MM can be edited after it has been saved. However, to ensure data authenticity there is no way for a user to edit the date, time, or coordinates of saved observations. Additionally, users can currently only edit data collected on the mobile they have access to, and not data synchronized with their mobile by collected on other phones. MD can edit all the data (except the date, time, and coordinates). (View Highlight)
- Due to how Mapeo stores data in a cryptographically signed immutable log (like a blockchain), once something is written into the database and saved it is permanently logged there. Even if it is later edited, the audit log could be examined by a technical expert to prove whether the data had or had not been edited since its creation. This could be useful, for example, in legal cases where a certification of authenticity might be needed for evidence. (View Highlight)
- Mapeo was not built for complex data analysis, and does not contain many provisions for it, as the developers wanted to keep its user interface simple and intuitive, to maintain the tech threshold for learning low. Its goal was to offer an easy way for communities to gather spatial data, manage and edit it, and make decisions about how to share it. If users have the skills and need to do further work with the data, it can be exported into various formats to be used within other tools for spatial or quantitative analyses (View Highlight)
- Whilst the application is open, user data is not, and all user collected data is currently only stored locally within project phones and computers (or wherever the user sends it), with no involvement of a server or online repository. This was a decision made by the developers both to ensure flat, peer-to-peer data hierarchy, and to protect data sovereignty, avoiding the dangers involved in making public certain types of sensitive data (Fagerholm, 2014). (View Highlight)
New highlights added May 24, 2024 at 3:33 PM
- On the other hand, digital mapping, especially online hosting of PM projects raises many concerns, including a limitation placed on individuals and groups in communities who are not well versed in the rapidly evolving PM software and computer-related spatial technologies. In particular, the uneven development of internet access structures in several communities in developing countries means that relatively little participation will occur among many of the stakeholders. There are also concerns about how genuine communication and significant interaction can be maintained among stakeholders and community groups in a web-based community mapping project. It is possible that with time the technology will alienate some of the very people in the community that PM was designed to serve and protect. Therefore, the integration of PM applications with the internet and digital mapping strategies raises prospects as well as concerns for access to technology among groups in the underprivileged communities of the world.
Additionally, the involvement of ‘local people’ in the participatory mapping process does not, in and of itself, make it an apolitical process. This is because power relations between various actors can and do often intervene. It can allow the voices of those who speak the loudest to prevail over other voices. The mapping process can be subject to elite capture in which dominant members of a community dictate the terms and tenor of the mapping process. In this context, the views of marginalized groups such as women and the poor may not be taken into consideration during the participatory meetings and gatherings. Furthermore, technological improvements often have unexpected consequences. In particular, the introduction of technological solutions into cultures where the people have limited prior knowledge of technology and the risks related to its use can potentially exacerbate these issues. Moreover, because geospatial mapping technologies were not initially developed for use in rural and other communities of underprivileged people, the tensions associated with their applications and impacts in participatory mapping projects that occur in the communities could be most apparent and profound (Fox et al., 2005).
Another negative side effect comes from using mapping techniques that create the village terrain as a defined territory with distinct and rigid boundaries in areas where resource boundaries have historically been flexible and negotiated (Turner, 1999; Roth, 2009). Generally, the spatial dimensions of social relations within the communities are complex and very complicated. The action space of individuals and community groups is not limited to territories with rigid boundaries (Gray, 2002; Li, 1996). For example, the economic and social activities of farmers, artisans and pastoral populations in the villages frequently reach beyond the boundaries of given territories (Li, 1996). Practically, community resources are characterized by both ecological diversity and socioeconomic differentiation (Leach et al., 1999) but the dynamic social systems are regularly mapped as static entities, leading to simplistic representations. Yet, the participatory mapping of community lands often ignores the fact that local resources are controlled by multiple and overlapping boundaries and authorities. (View Highlight)