My pal Dave Tulloch delves into the potential of empowerment and greater participation through online mapping.
He also points to the February 2006 cover article in the journal Nature, Mapping for the Masses.
Online mapping is the current killer app. What Dave and Nature leave out, probably because of space limitations, is the concurrent need for physical participation. We’ll have many new virtual tools to allow us to create individual empowerment (of course, it may be the appearance of empowerment). But it also can isolate us from members of our own geographic communities. That’s no substitute for the power of the group when it derives from people getting together in the same physical place to work out their differences and come to shared solutions.