Open Mapping towards Sustainable Development Goals : Voices of YouthMappers on Community Engaged Scholarship

Abstract

If you have ever used a smartphone to get directions to where you are going, or “fown” around the world using Google Earth while sitting at home, you have beneftted from geospatial data and technology. It is hard to imagine our lives today without these tools. But it hasn’t even been ffteen years since we became dependent on them. The capability that YouthMappers have today is as hopeful to me as explor ing space and going to the moon was for my rocket scientist father. As his young daughter, I was more fascinated with the scenes from space coming back to earth. The images of our planet from Landsat and the lower-orbit Space Shuttle are emblazoned in my mind forever. It made me wonder, were young students like me in other countries seeing these spectacular views? Could we use them to help grown-up leaders in the nations of the world fnd common ground and motivation to get along better? By the time I got to university, I could only dream of the kind of technol ogy that today allows students anywhere in the world view the same satellite imagery of a location on the ground, and make a map from it, at the same time. Because they know their homes and the day-to-day details about the places where they live, they can also add to the map by tagging attributes dur ing feldwork, giving their local knowledge, too, to the effort. Since YouthMappers are now located all over the world, we have an incredible opportunity to bridge the global and the local, and even connect to each other through the map. YouthMappers are a living example of this dream. They are using geospatial technology that evolved from prior space age investments to map communities today. Historically invisible communities can now be included, giving them a voice they did not previously have. Learning to map and analyze data they collect makes students aware of the issues; being part of the YouthMappers community motivates them to get involved and take action.