What is PPGIS?
“Public Participatory GIS is meant to bring the academic practices of GIS and mapping to the local level in order to promote knowledge production. The idea behind PPGIS is empowerment and inclusion of marginalized populations, who have little voice in the public arena, through geographic technology education and participation. PPGIS uses and produces digital maps, satellite imagery, sketch maps, and many other spatial and visual tools, to change geographic involvement and awareness on a local level.”
The Need for PPGIS
Creating awareness among the grassroots community that is unaware of either various public databases that exist or of the ways these can be used. The existence of Non-profit organizations and data suppliers that are usually eager to assist such grassroots organizations, but their names and willingness to help remain largely unknown to neighborhood residents. And so building a sophisticated user community of GIS among user communities, the existing residents grassroots community organizations should be made aware of the existence of public databases, awareness of existence of agencies that can provide access to pertinent data, technology information and GIS, build a valuable local knowledge to create new databases, how to obtain data from reluctant sources and finally having access to GIS and other information.
Additional Links:
Open Forum on Participatory Geographic Information Systems and Technologies
The Latest News and Opinions on PGIS/PPGIS Practice
