My final abstract as submitted to the Association of American Geographers conference where I will now be presenting in April 2010 in Washington DC! How cool is that!
Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) can be described as a central authority that narrowly defines a problem and selects those who are best able to contribute to the problem. In contrast, the evolution of a Social Internet and web-based mapping applications is enabling a grass-roots platform for location-based mass collaboration between multiple, self-defined, users. Such location-based mass collaborative systems facilitate broad public access to cooperative processes where citizens are empowered to (1) define a geospatial attribute within a mapping environment, (2) contribute data and information to this attribute, and (3) collectively make sense of the contributed data and information.
Prior studies provide conceptualizations of the PPGIS domain (Schlossberg & Shuford 2005, Carver et. al. 2001) that highlight the difference between various PPGIS applications. The recent evolution of Internet based GIS applications is challenging traditional PPGIS conceptualizations. Namely, novel web-based collaborative mapping applications offer new ways of defining ‘public’ and ‘participation’ and how these concepts interact with a GIS. Thus, existing PPGIS conceptualizations are not adequate for understanding location-based mass collaboration.


