Spatial data has traditionally been developed by government agencies and businesses who could afford the technical and financial expenditure necessary to digitize spatial information. Recent advances in web mapping and GPS technology make it possible for tech-savvy volunteers to develop their own spatial datasets. This sort of geographic data is frequently called "Volunteered Geographic Information" or VGI for short.
One of the most effective VGI efforts can be found at OpenStreetMap.org [4]. OpenStreetMap has the goal of developing a basemap of roads, place names, and other common spatial features for the world, based entirely on volunteered contributions. The OpenStreetMap project aims to provide a completely free worldwide geospatial dataset without any legal or technical restrictions on its use. Most popular web mapping resources like Google Maps or Bing Maps tightly constrain how their data can be manipulated, published, or displayed. Quite a few folks take it for granted that these maps are free, but, in fact, they are only free because those companies are providing access to them right now for free. You are not allowed to re-use and repurpose those resources or download their data yourself, and if Google decided tomorrow to charge you for access to their maps, you would have no recourse to ensure you kept access for free.
In addition to basemapping efforts like OSM, other forms of VGI appear in resources like WikiMapia [5] - a VGI effort intended to describe every place on earth.
Next I'd like you to take a look at Ushahidi (which means "testimony" in Swahili), a web portal originally designed to encourage and re-use VGI for crisis management support in Africa (and now is used around the world). Ushahidi lets users send reports about conditions on the ground via email, phone, and web interfaces. Ushahidi is an excellent example of how VGI can be harnessed for situational awareness in a crisis situation.
You can review out a wide range of examples showing how Ushahidi has been deployed in response to violence, disasters, and other crises by browsing recent deployments here [6]. Notice how users can easily contribute their own observations and locate them on the map. Since its original implementation focused on election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi has become a much more powerful platform, and has been deployed in recent earthquake disasters in Haiti [7] and Japan [8], among many other instances.
If you would like to read more, I recommend you check out an excellent position paper [10] by Michael Goodchild [11] which provides a nice summary of VGI and its implications for GIS.
Note: Post your response in the Lesson 3 Emerging Themes Discussion Forum in Canvas [12].
Links
[1] https://vimeo.com/9182869
[2] https://vimeo.com/itoworld
[3] https://vimeo.com
[4] http://www.openstreetmap.org
[5] http://wikimapia.org
[6] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog
[7] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2012/01/12/haiti-and-the-power-of-crowdsourcing
[8] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2011/03/16/crisis-mapping-japans-earthquake-and-how-you-can-help
[9] http://map.uaviators.org/uaviators/
[10] http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf
[11] http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~good/
[12] http://psu.instructure.com