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"Imagine if Twitter were to digest for you the range of agreement, disagreement, and mood of your friends. By pre-digesting information -- self-synthesizing, if you will -- modern maps have been able to foreshadow coming revolutions in information.
Unlike the web tools of the early 2000s – chat rooms, forums, wikis, blogs, and podcasts – crowd-sourced maps actually analyze the data given to them, sorting social information into patterns of local, regional, and global patterns.
The maps do not merely collect information, as a “memory hole” like Wikileaks does; rather, the maps show the community back to itself, revealing hot-spots of local corruption and pollution, giving activists the tools to target particular places with investigation or protest."
Via Howard Rheingold
h/t the indefatigable Michel Bauwens: I don't know whether it can save the commons, but participatory mapping is a particularly useful platform for augmented collective intelligence by all sorts of communities -- from public fruit trees to political protests.
(I wrote the following in 1998:
Maps + Databases + Internet = New Scientific, Civic, and Political Tools)