Project Vision

The MapStory project is animated by three core beliefs.

First, everything happens somewhere at sometime. To understand what is going on in the world and why, we must understand where it is happening, and when.

Second, knowledge is gained through collaboration.

And third, the more we all know about the story of our planet, the more likely we are to treat it, and each other well.

These beliefs are interconnected. They build on each other to provide our call to action. Understanding our world and our place in it requires a spatio-temporal lens. This lens is best developed through collaboration amongst caring and knowledgable people. And the more we know (the better lens we have) the better positioned we are to treat our Earth and its inhabitants well.

The MapStory project and platform puts these beliefs into action. MapStory.org is the free atlas of change that everyone can edit. We are a community, not a company, working to organize humanity’s shared knowledge about how the world evolves geographically over time, and to make this knowledge easily accessible as an open educational resource.

MapStorytellers work together in four key areas. We call them the “4 Cs”.

1. First, once you’ve created a profile, you can collect spatio-temporal data and import it. We call each dataset imported into MapStory.org a “StoryLayer”.
2. Second you can compose MapStories that provide nuanced understanding of historical change by combining StoryLayers and other narrative elements, like images, text, or video.
3. Third, you can curate the accuracy and quality of content presented in MapStory.org by adding ratings, checking metadata, making comments and committing version edits to the actual StoryLayers themselves, much like you might edit a Wikipedia page.
4. Finally you can convey the content (StoryLayers and MapStories) you create to a world of viewers either on MapStory.org or as embeds on other sites on the web.

Over time, MapStory.org aims to be a living resource whereby a broad range of stakeholders, from academics to journalists to teachers to lifelong learners can come to see how their world changes and share their own perspectives on what these changes mean for them.