Announcing Citizen Mapmakers & Data Artists November 1, 2002
SVG is not only a mapmaking but a general purpose data visualization tool. It is only fitting that we highlight this by placing data artists at the heart of this project. Sample work under development.

Announcing Citizen Mapmakers June 22, 2002
The Citizen Computing Institute is proud to inaugurate Citizen Mapmakers, a pioneering effort to promote collaborative, open source mapmaking among non-profits and public interest advocacy groups. Employing an exciting new graphics standard issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Citizen Mapmakers aims to place important political and social issues on the district maps of elected representatives and government agencies. The project's primary objective is to empower resource-poor individuals and groups with the skills and tools of SVG mapmaking so that they can more effectively educate the public about their issues and concerns.

All Citizen Mapmakers' source code and scripting is open source. That is, we make our code freely available for you to download and modify as you wish. We are, at the same time, developing our code through the voluntary open source development methods. We issue an open invitation to SVG developers who are interested in helping non-profits and public interest advoacy groups to contribute to our coding projects. See the Source Code page for a decription of goals for our initial conversion utility. We will soon open an online forum to facilitate collaborative code-writing.

Citizen Mapmakers will settle in on this site on a multi-installment plan. 'Putting Cancer Alley on the Map' is our first installment. Future additions will include:

more demo projects like the Cancer Alley map
a reference center with links to helpful SVG development resources on the web
'how to' information on SVG mapmaking geared toward public interest advocacy
downloadable files of the code with which we are developing maps
an online forum to facilitate open source mapmaking among public interest advocates and SVG developers
a national data access advocacy map to identify failures of public authorities to enable download of important map data.

We conceived of the project in the Fall of 2001 but other work obligations have slowed efforts to get it up and running here on the site. Under the multi-installment plan, we no longer have to delay getting started and will regularly launch new features as time permits.

Mike McCullough, mm@CitizenComputing.org

P.S. Included in "we" are my CCI colleagues Jeremy Shapiro and Dave Bellin. While the labor behind Citizen Mapmakers is largely mine at this point, Jeremy and Dave offer invaluable advice and feedback for this activity.