By Jeff Lee

Long before Mayor Gregor Robertson’s intemperate remarks calling public presenters political “hacks,” relations between Vancouver and its neighbourhoods were testy.

Politicians and community activists say that disconnect arose largely from the last city council’s EcoDensity program, which sought to layer citywide environmental goals into the way density, land use and design are considered in local planning processes.

Instead, the program fractured efforts by the city and neighbourhoods to develop local land-use plans through a careful, decade-long citywide exercise called CityPlan.

“Just the word density could strike fear in neighbourhoods,” said Robert Allen, the head of the Renfrew-Collingwood Visions Implementation Committee. “A lot of this tension has been below the surface for a long time.”

Allen, whose group worked with Vancouver to help each of the city’s 23 neighbourhoods develop updated community plans, said the trust-building exercise was killed the moment former mayor Sam Sullivan’s NPA-dominated council dropped the EcoDensity program on them. Dialogue stopped and many were enraged by the city’s preoccupation with politically charged rezonings that would strategically build density into neighbourhoods.

Now, neighbourhoods have learned to distrust the city’s planners and engineers, he said, because they never know if their local issues will be taken into consideration.

In recent months, the city has made concerted efforts at reconciliation with neighbourhoods, from plans for a “citizens’ summit” to air concerns to the creation of a stand-alone office for information and community engagement. But those efforts may have been set back by Robertson’s description last week of public presenters to council as “f——g … hacks.”

“Well, if I don’t think it helped,” said Coun. Andrea Reimer, who is spearheading the city’s efforts to “engage” communities again in cooperative civic affairs.

“Community engagement is all about trust and relationships, so it’s hard for his comments not to have an impact on that,” she said.

Robertson said in an interview the city doesn’t have strong relations any more with many community groups. He blamed much of that on Sullivan’s EcoDensity program, but acknowledged his own gaffe hasn’t helped matters.

“”It definitely creates a lot more work and effort to assure people that we’re open and listening and that we want dynamic debate on this,” he said.

“We’ve worked to improve consultation and engagement with neighbourhoods from day one and it has been a big challenge. Many neighbourhoods are wary and distrustful of city hall from previous administrations. It’s tough when we try to improve this and it is construed as the opposite, as closing down debate.”

Allen lives on the opposite side of the city from Doreen Braverman, the chairwoman of the Arbutus Ridge Concerned Citizens Association. But they share a common view that their communities are constantly at odds with city hall.

“They don’t listen and they don’t care,” said Braverman, whose group is opposed to a proposal to redevelop the Arbutus Centre shopping mall into a residential development. “I think the EcoDensity program really broke relations between community groups and city hall. But this group in office isn’t much better.”

She said Robertson’s remarks are “just what you think they think of you. It’s very phoney. I think what he’s done is make people realize we’re not just whistling Dixie when we say we’re not being listened to.”

Allen says that even though Robertson “did himself and his party no favours” with his comments, he thinks the mayor’s gaffe could won’t result in worse relations with communities.

“Actually, I think it will have the opposite effect. It points out that yeah, we do have issues in communication. So then it gives us the opportunity, just as we are doing now, to talk about it. I think that’s the silver lining in this.”

Reimer said the city is working hard to try to reconnect city hall with its neighbourhoods. This fall, several plans will go before council, including one to set up a single “Vancouver Office of Information and City Engagement” (VOICE), where people can get information neighbourhood issues, from rezonings to street improvements.

Reimer said that while the parts of EcoDensity that the Vision Vancouver council liked were folded into its Greenest City program, but the word “EcoDensity” still causes residents to shiver, she said.

This fall will also mark the first “citizens’ summit,” which Reimer said will allow residents to set their own agendas about what is important to them.

“Community engagement is not like building a bike lane. It’s not simple and it’s not technical. It is a process built on relationships and foundations of trust,” she said.

jefflee@vancouversun.com

By Jim Dempsey & Deirdre K. Mulligan

We see evidence of the Internet’s revolutionary impact in spheres ranging from commerce to entertainment to the way we now stay in touch with friends. The Fourth of July invites particular consideration of the Internet’s impact on democracy.

Moreover, it calls for a deeper understanding of the sources and conditions of the Internet’s influence: What is unique about the Internet? From what technical and policy choices does its power derive? And, most urgently, what must be done to maximize its potential to support democracy at home and abroad?

The Obama campaign was not the first to embrace the Web, but it set a new standard, using the Internet to raise millions from small donors and adopting online social media to mobilize volunteers and voters. Conservatives leveraged the same tools in electing a Republican to Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts.

Perhaps more important, the Internet is reshaping the daily processes of decision making at all levels of government. An extraordinary amount of official information is online. No longer are bills and drafts of regulations available only to lobbyists. Sacramento is one of a growing number of American cities that stream and archive council meetings, integrating video with agendas, minutes and other documents on a single Web page. Increasingly, e-government systems are becoming two-way. The Environmental Protection Agency has an online system for submitting technology solutions for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Department of Homeland Security is running an online consultation, open to all, on its draft strategy for improving the security of Internet transactions.

Some of the most exciting developments are at the neighborhood level, as citizens organize themselves, identify common issues and develop solutions that can then be presented to elected officials. One small nonprofit, e-democracy.org, hosts more than 25 forums in 15 communities across the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, providing a set of templates citizens can use to organize their discussions and build a shared understanding of a problem. Facebook, on the other hand, hosts 390,000 “causes” and uncounted advocacy groups.

Around the globe, the Internet is having similar effects. Online activism and networking permeates national politics across the spectrum of the world’s democracies. The Internet’s most striking ramifications, however, are in authoritarian countries, from worker walkouts in China coordinated with text messages to the Green Revolution’s use of cell phones in Iran to broadcast police violence to the world as the government blocked coverage by cable networks. And in terms of participatory use of the technology, other countries are actually ahead of the United States. Last year, La Plata, Argentina, combined in-person meetings, paper ballots, electronic voting and texting to allocate the city budget. Over 10 percent of the city’s voters participated.

Why is the Internet such a powerful platform for democratic activity? Fundamentally, the Internet’s technical architecture facilitates participation and connection. Unlike the concentrated mass media of the past century (newspapers, movies, radio, television), the Internet is uniquely decentralized, abundant and user-controlled. Production and distribution of content are inexpensive. Barriers to entry are low. Anyone with a computer (and increasing millions with mobile phones) can speak in the public forum, access a world of information and organize.

Equally important, in the early days of the Internet, policymakers, advocates, companies and coalitions built a policy architecture to steer the technology toward democratic ends. These policy choices embodied the principles of openness, innovation, interconnection, nondiscrimination, user control, freedom of expression, privacy and trust. It is this symbiosis of technology and policy that produced a platform on which individuals across the globe exercise their democratic muscles.

However, this framework is not guaranteed. Technologies can change. Features being built into the servers at the core of the network could facilitate censorship. Monitoring software deployed in the name of copyright protection or cybersecurity could be exploited to maintain political control.

The Internet’s legal code also is being challenged. Governments worldwide are seeking to force Internet service providers, Web 2.0 platforms and other intermediaries to filter content for a variety of purposes. Shifts in societal use of the Internet can outstrip legal protections, eroding core values when policymakers fail to act. Notably, the laws that protect privacy have not kept pace. For example, the cell phones we carry double as tracking devices, allowing governments to map our daily movements as courts and Congress fail to update rules.

Business models, too, can threaten openness. In the absence of rules enforcing nondiscrimination, service providers may cut deals favoring some content over other, and may even block controversial speech entirely. Several years ago, one service provider quickly reversed itself after briefly blocking pro-choice text messages.

Debates on these and other issues critical to the democratic future of the Internet are under way. The Federal Communications Commission launched a proceeding to re-establish rules of neutrality for Internet access providers. A coalition of companies and advocates is calling on Congress to strengthen standards for Internet surveillance. Internationally, things seem to be heading in the wrong direction, as countries from Italy to China are increasing regulatory burdens on Internet services.

Valid criticisms of the Internet abound. Sometimes it seems more like Bedlam than Independence Hall. The Internet’s cult of the amateur threatens to drown out sources of insight and knowledge, such as this and other newspapers. Social systems for verifying information online are still emerging.

Yet, taking stock on this July Fourth, it is clear that people around the globe have found in the Internet a powerful force for democratic ideals and action.

Our nation’s founders provided a durable framework for democracy and an inspiration to the world. Two hundred years later, the technical and policy architecture of the Internet can serve democracy as much as the concepts of limited government and separation of powers still do. Just as preserving democracy demands vigilant participation, so too we must actively engage in shaping the technical and legal code of the Internet.

Jim Dempsey is vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology and head of CDT West in San Francisco. Deirdre K. Mulligan is a faculty director at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law and Technology, a professor at the School of Information, and a board member of the Center for Democracy & Technology; her current research focuses on information privacy, cybersecurity and surveillance.

By Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera

I’m sure by now most of us have engaged at least once in one of those bitter conversations about how unfortunate it is that so many people spend more time socializing through some online platform instead of meeting friends in person and catching some vitamin D-rich sunlight in the process.

Well, despite the costs to face-to-face interactions, privacy drawbacks and security risks, a majority of technology leaders forecast that in 2020, when we look back at the Internet’s impact on our social lives, the assessment will be vastly more positive than negative.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University recently interviewed 895 technology experts, stakeholders and critics as part of a series of surveys about the evolution and social impact of online technologies.

Eighty-five percent of them thought that the Internet has been mostly a positive influence in their social worlds and that those benefits would only continue to increase. Online platforms, for instance, have reduced the costs of communicating (think about all the money you’ve saved in long distance calls when you keep in touch with friends and relatives through Skype, Facebook or instant messaging) and minimized the impact of barriers like time and geography.

The Internet, they said, has also made it easier to keep in touch with people and discover common interests that in the end enhance and nurture our relationships.

“I met my wife online, reconnected with my old school friends online, stay in touch with my family overseas online, and have a wide circle of close online friends,” said Jeremy Malcolm, co-director of the advocacy group Internet Governance Caucus.

However, 14 percent of respondents felt the opposite way and emphasized the negative impact of the Internet on human interactions.

Critics noted that hiding behind the veil of the Web has led to shallow relationships and even engendered intolerance. Exposing private information has also become the price tag for many social interactions through some of the most popular networking platforms.

“Insofar as online interaction replaces real-world interaction, the Internet is a negative force in the social world. I know what 15 of my friends had for breakfast, but I don’t know whether any of them is struggling with major life issues. If this trend continues, people in 2020 will have hundreds of acquaintances but very few friends,” said Gervase Markham, a programmer for the Mozilla Foundation.

In any case, many interviewees believed, we haven’t seen the full extent of the impact of these technologies in our social lives, as future advancements promise to continue transforming the ways we communicate and relate to each other.

“Among the technologies mentioned were: holographic displays and the bandwidth necessary to carry them; highly secure and trusted quantum/biometric security; powerful collaborative visualization decision-based tools; permanent, trusted, and unlimited cloud archive storehouses; open networks enabled by semantic web tools in public-domain services; and instant thought transmission in a telepathic format,” the report noted.

- Posted by Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera

By Seattle Times editorial board

Two Metropolitan King County Council members propose new labor policies that would end the county’s long-standing and anachronistic automatic cost-of-living pay increases. The council would be wise to adopt either or a combination of both plans.

County employees have been living in an altered state, pretending the county has enough money to award employees 2 to 6 percent annual cost-of-living increases even if that cost dropped as it did last year. That makes no sense.

Council Chairman Bob Ferguson and Councilmember Kathy Lambert offer different proposals to accomplish similar goals: to change de facto policy that institutionalizes cost-of-living increases. Lambert has been working this issue almost two years and deserves considerable kudos for bringing the matter to the forefront.

Lambert and Ferguson should join forces to combine and refine proposals and rally enough votes to support the new approach. By doing so, the council would send a powerful message to labor that the economic realities of the 21st century require new rules.

More

By David Brooks

“….In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president take ‘control’…They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change.

At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government. If this disaster teaches anything, it is that we are a venturesome, entrepreneurial society. We rely on corporations like BP to bring us energy…We want regulation to be strong enough to reduce risk but not so strong as to stifle innovation. We want regulators to work cooperatively but not be captured by those they monitor…We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversations based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins.

By Scott Gutierrez, Seattle PI.com

Link to original

King County soon will have a “one-stop” data website where crime statistics, transit data, information on public parks, and even reports on wastewater treatment flow would be readily available to the public.

On Monday, the King County Council unanimously passed an ordinance requiring county agencies to publish “high-value” datasets to the new website. All agencies are asked to try to publish at least one database.

While partly to encourage transparency through technology, county officials hope private software developers will snatch up the data to build nifty applications or interactive maps that make information more useful or easier to understand.

An example often cited is OneBusAway, a popular application for transit riders that uses Metro Transit data to show buses’ real-time arrival information from the Web or a Smartphone. A University of Washington graduate student built the open-source application working with data provided by the transit agency. Some 20,000 riders now use the service.

The data site is supposed to be ready by Nov. 1. County Executive Dow Constantine has until Aug. 1 to submit a list of suggested datasets to make available. The data will be provided in an open format so it can be shared across platforms. It will be scrubbed of any personal or private information.

“This is a great example of how government can tap into the entrepreneurial spirit and the expertise we have in the region,” said Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who sponsored the legislation.

The ordinance doesn’t require county agencies to collect new data. “We already have plenty of existing data that we should make available,” he said.

More and more governments are pulling back the curtains on their data archives. “OpenGov” or “Government 2.0″ has become the slogan for the idea that technology can make democracy more democratic by electronically putting information right at people’s fingertips.

A number of third-party websites and Smartphone applications have emerged using government data to engage citizen involvement or provide consumer information. Some examples include Crimespotting in San Francisco, which displays crime data on an interactive map; or Everyblock.com , which sets up newsfeeds for your block by scraping government websites for information on building permits, restaurants inspections, and real-estate transactions.

Seattle, like San Francisco, New York and other cities, launched Data.Seattle.Gov this year with more than 150 data sets. The site is a work in progress, but you can thumb through for data on Fire Department 9-1-1 calls, building permits, park-and-ride lots, and the location of city traffic cameras. The site soon will become a platform for Seattle Police Department crime-maps and police reports. The site includes an e-mail contact for users to provide comments and suggestions.

At the state level, Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a new law this year that encourages agencies as a best practice to post their most frequently requested records online.

With its Open Government Directive, the Obama administration launched data.gov, a site with nearly 1,000 datasets from federal agencies, including crime stats, housing data and consumer product information.

King County already makes data available online but not through a centralized location. County officials have been meeting with developers and citizens to determine what data would be most interesting and how best to make it available.

As evidenced by applications like OneBusAway, King County Metro Transit has already seen some of the fruits from opening transit data up to developers. Last fall, the agency hosted a workshop to discuss the best ways of “harnessing private-sector innovation to find new tools to provide riders with timely and accurate bus information.” More than 50 people attended.

Metro has it’s own regional Trip Planner online. But like many government agencies in tight budget times, cash-strapped Metro doesn’t have the resources to always work on new applications in-house. In April, the agency opened up more of its “behind-the-scenes” data through Metro online. It’s free as long as users agree to terms of service, which would also be the case with other county datasets.

Two months ago, Seattle’s City Hall was the site of the OpenGovWest conference, which brought government officials, software developers, private companies, civic activists and IT managers together to talk about the possibilities and challenges in opening the data closet to the masses.

Sarah Schacht, founder of Knowledge as Power, a nonprofit site that helps citizens use the Web to track issues through the legislative process, organized the conference with help from city officials. In an interview with seattlepi.com before the conference, she described OpenGov is the idea that “new technology can help our governments do the work of being accountable and accessible so that they can be more effective at meeting needs of citizens.”

“The vast majority of governments right now are facing major challenges to modernize technology and to open up processes,” she said. “It’s not necessarily a lack of will, but a lack of funding and expertise. Frankly, they have a lot of information they manage and it’s very difficult to get the gigantic ball rolling.”

Matt Rosenberg, editor of the Social Capital Review blog, features a tool he calls the Public Data Ferret. It surfaces important audit reports, financial documents and other materials available on government websites that very often are overlooked.

On his blog, Rosenberg wrote about the importance of governments providing more data under the “disclose and discuss” model.

“For example, picture easy Web access to a data package listing identified repairs needed to city streets and other city infrastructure such as curbs, sidewalks, streetlights, outdoor city stairways (there are 400-plus) and parks facilities. Picture each category listed on a spreadsheet and juxtaposed with the cost, priority level, agency responsible, anticipated completion date of each repair, and funding source,” he wrote.

“This kind of disclosure could stimulate valuable discussion about city infrastructure needs versus monetary resources, and how to close the gap,” he wrote.

By Robert Goguen

Let the bells ring out and the banners fly. Shawn Graham has seen the light. After ignoring the people of New Brunswick for the three-and-a-half years since he was elected, the premier has now done an about face and is now interested in the opinions of New Brunswickers.

Like Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus or the Beatles going to India to meet with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Shawn Graham too found enlightenment, in his case at a Liberal retreat in St. Andrews.

But in Mr. Graham’s case, finding a better way wasn’t so much a spiritual experience as, dare we say, a political one, born out of the reality that there’s an election coming in the next four months.

To quote Mr. Graham from Thursday’s Telegraph-Journal, “I feel a change in the mood and tone of New Brunswickers.” No kidding. The premier is now sensing that New Brunswickers want to be consulted on decisions that affect them. Who’d have thunk it?

What in the world would have given him that idea? He never felt especially obligated to do anything but ignore New Brunswickers on every major decision he has made so far, until the inevitable public pressure forced him to backtrack. But now he senses that New Brunswickers want to be consulted? Let’s look at some possible clues that could have led to the premier coming to this conclusion.

Could it have been the 30,000-plus plus people who joined a Facebook group upset that the proposed sale of NB Power was being hoisted on them without them being allowed a say, or the 3,000 or so people who gathered on the legislature lawn to protest on one or more occasion, or the New Brunswick citizens who had to take him to court to save their French second language programs, or could it have been the thousands who took to the streets of Saint John to fight the government’s intention to change UNBSJ into a polytechnic?

No, it couldn’t have been any of those, because after each of those decisions ended in failure, he never once said it was because the people of the province were opposed. Even after the grand-daddy of them all, the NB Power deal collapsed, the premier still couldn’t bring himself to admit it was because New Brunswickers didn’t want it; rather, he blamed it on Quebec. In other words, he could care less what New Brunswick voters want.

So what could it be that has resulted in this change in attitude? Back in 2007, his government paid Ontario consultant Don Lenihan $100,000 to improve the government’s public consultation process, but despite spending that amount of taxpayer’s money, the consultant’s recommendations were ignored. So even with a blueprint of how to do it, the premier couldn’t actually bring himself to try listening to New Brunswickers. It was a concept he simply couldn’t get his head around.

But now, more than three years later, he’s ready. Bring on the people, he wants to hear what New Brunswickers think; he really does. But why now? What’s changed? Could it be at their retreat in St. Andrews this week they suggested that with mere months to go before the election, it might be time to take a page from the PC playbook and consult with the public from time to time?

The appointing of a specific ministry to be in charge of public engagement is further evidence Mr. Graham doesn’t understand the concept. Public engagement shouldn’t be something separate from the operations of government. Public engagement is a philosophy of governing; a principle that guides decisions across all departments, not something relegated to a specific ministry

The premier is going to appoint a minister whose job, I assume, will be to remind other ministers that they should take a few minutes every now and then to ask New Brunswickers what they think.

It’s laughable. What it shows is that the premier still doesn’t get it. That’s a major difference between him and David Alward. Mr. Alward sees public consultation and public engagement as a fundamental responsibility of government. Mr. Graham seems to see it as a public relations exercise.

The appointing of a specific ministry to be in charge of public engagement is further evidence Mr. Graham doesn’t understand the concept. Public engagement shouldn’t be something separate from the operations of government. Public engagement is a philosophy of governing; a principle that guides decisions across all departments, not something relegated to a specific ministry.

If you have a government that believes in public consultation and public engagement, you don’t need a Minister of Public Engagement. In fact, such a position would be redundant and a waste of money and resources.

Since the premier chose to leave people out of every major decision even after a report his own government commissioned advised him to consult, there is no reason for anybody to believe that this will change just because he found a way to grab a headline by dreaming up an appointment. Thoughts of leopards and their spots come to mind.

Robert Goguen is a partner at a law firm in Moncton and president of the Progressive Conservative party of New Brunswick.

By Mike Swift

When Brian “Beej” Hall first heard about an audacious volunteer effort to create an Internet map of every street and path in every city and village on the planet, he was hooked. At the time, the nascent effort had only a few American members, and the U.S. map was essentially a digital terra incognita.

Just a few years later, the Berkeley software engineer is editing digital maps so precise they include drinking fountains and benches in the Bay Area parks where he hikes, and the mapping community has swelled to more than 240,000 global members.

The effort, OpenStreetMap, is a kind of grass-roots Wikipedia for maps that is transforming how map data are collected, shared and used — from the desktop to smartphones to car navigation.

Volunteers have mapped everything from bike paths in Silicon Valley to bear cages in the Berlin Zoo, and added places like Nairobi slums that are often ignored by commercial cartographers. In the hours after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, OpenStreetMap produced detailed digital maps of a quake-altered Port-au-Prince that were crucial to relief workers on the ground, a “crisis mapping” template for future disasters.

But increasingly, the nonprofit community-collaboration model behind OpenStreetMap, which shares all the cartographic data in its maps for free, is also changing the business of mapping, just as Wikipedia changed the business of reference. More and more, the accuracy of searches on Google Maps or directions issued by your car’s navigational device are based on data collected by volunteers like Hall and other members of OpenStreetMap’s do-it-yourself army.

“A lot of people thought ‘garbage in; garbage out’ — if you only had the ordinary Joe on the street contributing data, you’d get bad data,” said Steve Coast, who founded OpenStreetMap as a university student in Britain. He started the effort in 2004 when he couldn’t find any open-source digital map data, and decided to go out and map Regent’s Park in London himself. “And in fact, it’s much better data.”

Coast also has co-founded a Menlo Park, Calif., startup, CloudMade, which produces a variety of for-profit map software products drawn from OpenStreetMap data.

OpenStreetMap uses public mapping data from government agencies and aerial imagery donated by Yahoo and others.

Its master Internet map is also based on large amounts of data uploaded by volunteer mappers who use GPS units to trace roads, trails and other features. Google also increasingly relies on feedback from users to make sure its digital maps are accurate and comprehensive, but it does not allow users to directly upload data into its maps, at least not yet.

In the next few months, though, Google plans to introduce a product in the U.S. called Map Maker, which gives users much more power to customize maps.

And Tele Atlas, a company that supplies digital map data used for everything from car-navigation devices to 911 dispatching, now allows individual users to suggest map changes directly from their navigation devices.

Outdoor hobby

Citizen mapping is “an evolution of the entire mapping process,” said Richard Taketa, chairman of the geography department at San Jose State University. It “is going to be part of the mapping world as we move on to the future.”

Like orienteering or geocaching, mapping can become a kind of outdoor hobby, with a touch of something more.

“There is a very strong community ethic around it,” said Marc Prioleau of Palo Alto, Calif., who has mapped mountain bike trails in the Santa Cruz Mountains and ski trails at Squaw Valley in the Sierra. “In some parts of the country, in some parts of the world, it’s as much a social group as it is a maps group.”

Shawn Britton, a Santa Clara software engineer, has discovered that adding mapping to the Sierra Club hikes he leads attracts more people. On a recent five-mile hike through Uvas Canyon County Park near Morgan Hill, his group carried two GPS units that tracked the exact location of trails.

Hall, who uploaded some of the first U.S. place names into OpenStreetMap from a government database back when the community was first branching out from the U.K. and Europe, has attended a number of “mapping parties” in the Bay Area. People get together to map an area, then adjourn to a local watering hole to upload data and socialize.

“It’s everything from young students still in college to retirees,” said Hall, 38, who has also mapped remote areas of California such as the Lava Beds National Monument. “Some people love it because they love maps. Some people really like the idea of free data.”

It took about three years for OpenStreetMap to hit 10,000 users, but over the past 12 months, the community has jumped from about 110,000 members to 244,000.

Google has also been surprised by the emotional response people have had to its Map Maker product, which is available in 181 countries from Africa to the Philippines, with some individual users contributing tens of thousands of edits.

“Those local users took that to heart as a way to elevate their local community, to sort of put themselves on the map,” said Lior Ron, group product manager for Google Maps. “The concept of what a map is, is changing. With these tools, this is no longer just something that is owned by a government; it’s owned by the community.”

Debate on models

There is debate about which model produces better maps — OpenStreetMap’s volunteer community or a traditional commercial mapmaker like Tele Atlas, which primarily relies on its proprietary mobile-mapping-van technology, as well as satellite and aerial imagery and other sources.

Of OpenStreetMap, “I’m sure for some people and some applications the data they have is sufficient,” said Patrick McDevitt, vice president of community mapping for Tele Atlas, noting its data are used for critical functions like dispatching ambulances.

OpenStreetMap users say that because their data are collected by people who actually live in a place, it is more likely to be accurate.

“It’s the people’s map,” said Paul Jarrett, director of mapping at CloudMade.