Building an Online Mapping Community

I really like what ESRI has been doing over the last year or so with ArcGIS Online.  I believe they underestimated the value and power of an online collaborative mapping community and were surprised by the popularity of the Google Earth Community.  The last couple of years at their International User Conferences ESRI has been pushing very hard to catch up and create an online collaborative mapping community platform of their own.  I think ArcGIS Online can fill this niche well.  It is nice to see ESRI put resources and effort into this capability.  I have heard ESRI talk for the last couple of years about how important it is to harness the power of crowd sourcing so that everyone can contribute content and create maps, but the price of their software was prohibiting that from happening.  They produce state-of-the-art mapping software, but it is professionally targeted and beyond the ability of the mapping hobbiest to pay for.  What ESRI has done with ArcGIS Online is provide significant mapping capability within the reach of all people.

I have been using ArcGIS Online extensively over the last couple of months and I believe ESRI has created a great collaborative mapping platform.  We are using ArcGIS Online as the platform to host our first online mapping community, the Route 66 Mappers.  I have posted the map of Illinois segment of Route 66 on ArcGIS Online and plan to develop the route from Chicago to Santa Monica via a community format through ArcGIS Online.

Community mapping is a powerful medium to share data in an online environment.  But beyond that, Google Earth has shown us the incredible capability and significant amount of information crowd sourcing can provide.  What ESRI does through ArcGIS Online does that Google through Google Earth can't do is bring professional mappers (GIS Professionals) and collaborative sourcing together into one mapping community. I think ESRI has hit a homerun with ArcGIS Online.

VerticalGeo plans to develop several online mapping communities and leverage ArcGIS Online as the platform for all of them.  No one is more passionate about what they do for a living that GIS Professionals, that is why ESRI's User Conferences continue to grow so quickly.  I am eager to see what projects can be done with this platform.