History of the Project

Where We've Been

The MapStory effort was started in April, 2012 by Dr. Christopher Tucker. A political scientist by training, Chris believed everything in the world "happens somewhere at some time" and imagined a community driven atlas where all that we know or believe about what has happened on Earth could be mapped over time.

In his original blog post about the project, Chris describes the vision this way:

If this thing goes right, MapStory will serve as a new dimension to the global data commons that enables everyone on earth to organize and share what they know about their world spatially and temporally, instead of encyclopedically the way Wikipedia allows. This data (what we call StoryLayers) will be shared with the world under a Creative Commons license, and perhaps someday we will have the technology to make them editable by the crowd the way a wiki works. Also, (again, if things go right) MapStory will empower people to publish their narratives (what we call MapStories) atop this data to a global audience. A global megaphone by which everyone can tell their stories about the world.

A prototype of the MapStory site was launched at the 2012 Foss4g North America conference. Here's a Direction's Magazine review of the soft launch: "MapStory Soft Launches".

A non-profit organization, MapStory Foundation, was set up to govern the project and ongoing partnerships with OpenGeo (now Boundless Geo), Arizona State University Decision Theatre, among others, were formed to support technical development and testing for the platform.

In October, 2014 the Atlantic Magazine published a review of MapStory, dubbing it One Mapping Service to Rule Them All.

Technical tickets from the prototype platform are archived in the MapStory-Meta repo.

In 2015 funding was secured to undergo a complete re-engineering of the platform, specifically focused on integrating "community editing" for layers, as was always envisioned, and on improving the storytelling and overall user experience. The Roadmap governing the rebuild is available here and technical tickets for the rebuild are here

Where We Are Now

On September 1, 2018 we launched the MapStory Beta, a minimum viable product that allows a user to persist through the full 4-part MapStory workflow, from collecting data to composing stories to curating quality to conveying finished work to the world. The nonprofit MapStory foundation is now working with its network of open source software engineers and MapStorytellers to sustain and improve on the beta.

Where We Are Going

MapStory operates a continuous improvement process anchored by a community roadmap, available here. The roadmap articulates immediate, near term, medium term, and long-term priorities and unscheduled idea. In the broadest sense, our strategic focus is to sustain the core Beta features as the user community grows and to gradually role in new features that offer the biggest impact for our most passionate users. As we’ve said, MapStory is a community, not a company. We are driven by those who “show up”, and thus our roadmap and priorities are always open for discussion and debate within the community.