Your Mapper - Know Your Neighborhood

Challenges Entered:

The core idea behind Your Mapper is to create an easy way to make public information that has long been locked up in internal government databases, and present it to the world in a way that is visually appealing, easy to understand, and local.Examples of these kinds of datasets would be crime, restaurant health reviews, traffic accidents, building permits, sex offender registries, property values, and pollution sources, or anything that can be linked to a physical address or location. Because each government office stores each of theses items internally in very different formats, it would take too many resources to create a relationship with these local agencies and obtain data dumps on a regular basis. Your Mapper empowers concerned citizens to collect and share this information, since they know their town or city and have a good idea of what others living there would want to see made public.I do not believe that altruism alone is enough to encourage local Mappers to load and maintain quality local data, so Your Mapper actually compensates the Mappers based on the amount of website advertising and embedded map revenue generated that is specifically related to their maps. This would empower the Mappers to become "local experts," much like Google's Knol project and Helium.com does.

What else have you done in this area of work?

Currently I run an online news service called Metro Mapper, which provides interactive maps of crime, restaurants, sex offender locations, and historic sites to the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky and the surrounding area. We have a set of internal tools that allow us to load data quickly and turn it into useful maps for the public.

Your Mapper would make these tools available for public use, and extend Metro Mapper nationally. An essential social community layer would be added on top of Metro Mapper to allow Mappers and their maps to be rated, flagged, and commented on.

Your Mapper would leverage our existing technology and reporting tools for Community Sites to embed the maps quickly and easily on their own site.

I consider Metro Mapper to be a proof of concept for a local municipality using some high-profile datasets, and the first step to creating the truly groundbreaking, national, and more robust service of Your Mapper.

Project Details

Project url:

http://www.metromapper.org/

Project video:

Project RSS:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MetroMapperBlog

Project Assessment

Financial support:

Project has financial support

Project goals:

Three major empowering things would be improved in the world if this project happens. One: Empowering local public citizens to learn about their neighborhood and take action when they identify a need. Citizens can view interesting things happening around their home and office on a map, and get notified when new things happen. Two: Empowering local people to collect information that is currently locked up in government databases, and use our toolset to load that data and make it geographically and visually accessible to the public. Three: Empowering local websites, blogs, news organizations, and companies by allowing them to embed searchable, interactive maps on their site as a service to their site audience. Your Mapper is an online news organization that empowers people to obtain and load information in their home town, and make it available to their neighbors. We provide the tools that make this happen. People who load the data (called "Mappers") only have to decide on what data they want, contact their local government agency for it, and assemble it into a spreadsheet. Once the spreadsheet is ready we provide the tools to load it into Your Mapper, turn it into a public searchable map, and let the Mappers manage the data online and updates to the data.People who look at the the online maps (called "Citizens") can type in any address in the United States, and see a list of all the maps available. They can subscribe to feeds and updates and downloads. Each map will have meta information provided by the Mappers, and Citizens can rate the quality of the data and map content, leave comments, flag inappropriate data, and save their favorite maps. The community aspects and rating system ensures that the best maps bubble to the top of the site, and even allow Mappers in the same city to 'compete' to load the highest quality, most valuable information to for the Citizens.Local websites and businesses (called "Community Sites") can choose which maps they might like to put on their own websites, choose the starting point, map size, and other options, and with a little cut & paste can have these maps on their site in no time.

Identified Obstacles:

 Business Manager/PartnerA skilled business person who understands new web technologies and would be a good compliment to my existing skill sets and experience. PHP DevelopersPHP and MySQL programmers who are excited and knowledgable about internet programming, AJAX, user interface, and "Web 2.0" concepts. Security, database scalablity, and performance are all important issues to consider. People PersonThe forward facing part of the service, forging initial relationships with government agencies, courting local Mappers, working with Community Sites, and generating interest in local areas and the press.  

Location

Louisville, KY

United States

See map: Google Maps

Submitted by metromapper on March 5, 2008 - 7:01am

perhaps I can help craft templates to motivate people + get $

Submitted by KARE ANDERSON (not verified) on June 12, 2008 - 8:52am.

Here's how I can help, if it interests you. Regarding revenue and getting more participation, I can create a template for

â€¢ matching suggested features for each map with non-profits (national with strong local chapters such as Rotary Clubs, Toastmasters, chambers of commerce, etc.)

â€¢ matching features for which firms (national & local) will want to fund something.... in ways that complement rather than clash or overshadow the great community-serving features of this still-unfolding creation. I am a former WSJ reporter, now author/speaker who has spoken at conferences of municipal governments etc.... wrote some books on partnering... am based in a town I'd love to see adopting this service and would like to help make it happen with your geeky assistance: Sausalito

Kare

http://www.sayitbetter.com/meeting_planners.html
http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/
http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sayitbetter

Reason for Generating Revenue

Submitted by metromapper on May 2, 2008 - 9:33am.

I'd like to comment on the need for the Your Mapper service to generate revenue. At its core, Your Mapper is a news organization, a jounalism source. And it is being created to empower the public.

Generating revenue for services provided around the datasets is essential for the operation of the site concept. Without revenue to pay back the Mappers, the datasets will not be of a high enough quality to be useful. Without revenue to support the core team and server infrastructure, the site will not be efficient, scalable or useable to the Citizens. The paid embedding of the maps in local Community Sites allows revenue generation, helps cover all costs, and rewards the Mappers.

Great project

Submitted by dborsch on March 14, 2008 - 9:31am.

Good Luck. This looks like a very helpful site for presenting very complex data in a format that the public can understand and visualize.

Dan

Internet Explorer 7

Submitted by metromapper on March 14, 2008 - 2:32am.

I've just confirmed some reports from some of my users that it's not possible to star a project if you are using Internet Explorer 7 on a PC. The icon is not visible or clickable.

Until this is resolved, please vote using Firefox or Safari or Opera.

Get Firefox here.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and I'll contact the site's owners to let them know.

quick comment

Submitted by franklin.runge on March 13, 2008 - 5:47pm.

As our culture begins to recognize anew the importance of local economies and sustainablity (from buying local agriculture to becoming more involved in local politics), I think that this project's ability to link people to information is critical and timely.

Hyper Local Content

Submitted by metromapper on March 14, 2008 - 2:29am.

Thanks a lot for the comment Franklin, and that's a very good point. A goal of this project is to provide 'hyper local' information about things of value to you that are happening right around your home or workplace, not just in your larger zip code. Local food, neighborhood pride, and local politics all tie into this empowerment of the local individual through access to information.

maps

Submitted by R on March 9, 2008 - 6:23pm.

Lets do it.

Thanks

Submitted by metromapper on March 12, 2008 - 11:37am.

Thanks for the encouragement R.

EveryBlock.com

Submitted by justinmassa on March 5, 2008 - 2:04pm.

You should check out www.everyblock.com - a very similar project currently in NYC and Chicago.

Every Block and Your Mapper

Submitted by metromapper on March 5, 2008 - 2:47pm.

Justin,

Everyblock.com is a terrific site by Adrian Holovaty the creator of chicagocrime.org. It's very similar to what I want to do, but with a number of important distinctions.

Currently Every Block scrapes most of their data from existing websites. I'd like to avoid some of the technical and legal implications of this. I also want to make public data that is not available at all on the internet right now, though open records requests for database dumps.

Every Block also gathers all of their data by a group of people in-house. While Your Mapper would be doing some of that, I want to open the process up to the general public, enabling people living in large cities, small towns, and rural areas too to gather and load data.

To do this, I think we need to provide incentives to the Mappers loading the data. And to do that, we need to make some revenue from the services we provide, and be profitable. Every Block is running off of temporary money from a Knight Foundation grant (although who knows what the future holds for them). Instead, Your Mapper will be self sustaining.

Your Mapper will also provided services that Every Block does not, like the ability to embed custom maps in other sites, and collect revenue from that, for corporate or high-traffic clients.

I absolutely love what they have done with the site so far, and the Your Mapper interface will be very similar to theirs on the front end. And there are definitely overlaps in terms of the services and data provided. I even see that as we both grow there could be some synergies created, maybe some piggybacking and the sharing of data and knowledge.

I think we share the same some of the same esoteric goals of getting data out to the public, and making it interesting and useful to people, and focusing on the ideas of hyper-local services and news reporting.

Comment 2

Submitted by metromapper on March 6, 2008 - 3:34am.

(more comments later)

open data

Submitted by justinmassa on March 6, 2008 - 5:34am.

Gotcha on the distinctions with EveryBlock.com - makes sense.

In Chicago (where I'm based), getting municipalities to open up with the data they own has been a bit of an issue. Along with a bunch of other orgs, MoveSmart.org (my org/project - would love to hear your comments: http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/movesmart-org-beta) is convening a group of area data stakeholders under the IDEA mantle (www.chidataexchange.net, founded my CMAP, a regional and quasi-governmental planning agency). The idea is that if we can get a threshold of enough data shared in a single source, getting municipalities to open up with what they have will be easier. Currently, most just fulfill FOIA's with paper rather than electronic files. But beyond that, we don't want to rely on FOIA requests to obtain the data - municipalities should want to share it.

Good Luck!

Open Data

Submitted by metromapper on March 12, 2008 - 11:44am.

Justin,

The open data initiative is fantastic and will eventually solve the problems I've been having. Chicago is a good place to start, with the larger cities eventually following, but I bet it will take a decade or more before the smaller towns and rural areas are all on board. I'd be interested in helping spread the data exchange initiative around the country.

Of course the funny thing is that government agencies should not only want to share their data, but they are really required to share most of it, since it's public record. FOIA requests get the job done but are time consuming, like you said. This digital data exchange is really the way to go, saving everyone time, money and effort.

Until it catches on, I propose a solution like Your Mapper, crowd sourcing the masses to get the job done.