Spatial Data
Mapping with Mapeo

Participatory mapping in the Amazon with Mapeo // Announcing a Major Investment from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Technology Preview Participatory mapping in the Amazon with Mapeo Gregor MacLennan July 22, 2016 Mapeo is an easy-to-use offline mapping app built on iD Editor, the default editor for OpenStreetMap. We built Mapeo for our work with indigenous communities in the Amazon and around the world, who asked us for an easier way to create and edit their own maps. The excellent work done by the iD contributors significantly lowers the barrier for a non-technical user to use a GPS and put their neighborhood on the map. Watch the short video to see the Seikopai (Secoya) people of Ecuador using Mapeo in a remote community, deep in the Amazon, to map their neighborhood: the network of deep blackwater lakes filled with caimans, river dolphins, and stories of the Seikopai peoples’ origins and history. Mapeo is built on top of osm-p2p, a peer-to-peer database designed to be used where internet is unreliable and teams need to make maps together, but can’t stay connected. For example: two villages a half-day walk apart working together on the same map of their shared territory. Mapeo provides a simple interface for adding and editing data and then synchronizing changes to a USB drive that can be taken to the next village, bringing the two datasets in sync. We consider Mapeo alpha software right now: there are bugs and it is under active development. Our partners are already using it in Ecuador to create detailed and beautiful maps, and our team is working remotely directly with community mappers to learn about what works well and what needs improving. Over the next couple of months we are cleaning up the code, improving documentation, and creating auto-updating installers for Mac OSX and Windows. If you’re feeling brave you can follow development, test it out, and help fix bugs and write code: everything is being done in the open over at the Mapeo Github repo If you are in Seattle for State of the Map US this weekend July 23—24, search me out and watch out for a birds-of-a-feather session about Mapeo and other tools we are building to bring OpenStreetMap tools to remote communities in the Amazon.
=============================================================================br> Announcing a Major Investment from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation
br> Emily Jacobi November 15, 2017
br> Today is World GIS Day, a celebration of how GIS technology is applied. We’re thrilled to celebrate this day with the public launch of our offline mapping tool Mapeo, thanks to a grant of $525,000 from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Read our full press release.
br> For the past four years, the Digital Democracy team has been working directly with indigenous communities in the Amazon to test and prototype tools for mapping and territorial monitoring. Over the past year, we’ve seen how our partners have used Mapeo to map hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and tell the stories of deep connection to their land through maps.
br> The need for new software came from our partners – indigenous communities – who find that existing software is unsuitable due to its complexity, online dependence or top-down management. The people we work with wanted something that would enable the whole community, including non-literate members, to understand how the mapping was being done, a system which they could edit and manage and which would produce maps in line with their values and cultures.
br> Mapeo builds off of OpenStreetMap’s easy-to-use iD Editor, which can be customized to create presets in any language, and symbology designed by the communities.
br> We have built Mapeo in close partnership with Amazon Frontlines and Alianza Ceibo, our partner organizations based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Waorani, Cofan & Siekopai members of Alianza Ceibo have been testing Mapeo over the past year and a half, and are actively using the tool for territorial mapping.
br> Opi Nenquimo returning the final maps in Nemonpare
br> “With Mapeo we have, for the first time, a tool that we can use to make our own maps, and we can build a strong team of people who can train others to map,” said Opi Nenquimo, the Waorani project lead from Alianza Ceibo. “The mapping project has united many villages to defend and manage their lands together. And it is a process which is leaving a legacy for the future, both the maps and the skills, that our people can use to fight for our livelihoods and our rights.”
br> A test version of Mapeo desktop is available for download here. We are currently in the design phase for Mapeo Mobile, an app for mapping and monitoring that will allow groups to collaborate on collecting information about the world around them and share it with each other, or wider audiences.
br> For more on the mapping process, read our blog post from March about how the Waorani people are using Mapeo in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
br> If you are interested in the technical workings of Mapeo, read this blog post, and visit our GitHub page, where you can follow along and jump into the issues and help us continue to improve Mapeo.