Field Testing Volunteer Geographic Information Collection – The Viability of Community Mapping

Abstract

The ubiquity of Internet service and the GPS chip, fused into a device that people cannot leave home without (their phone), has facilitated the rise of “Volunteered Geographic Information” (VGI). VGI has a promising premise; locals go where outsiders can’t and are theoretically able to provide highly accurate and useful spatial information. This paper explores one aspect of VGI with the findings from a study of an effort to train volunteers to map “Points of Interest” (POIs) in two Minnesota counties. The findings illustrate that volunteers in rural tourism hubs find the idea of collecting and representing their community’s POIs on interactive digital maps relatively easy and useful for community development and tourism. However, the volunteers’ apparent enthusiasm does not correlate with the amount of data they collected and mapped.