Aaron P. Sani

Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) promotes collaborative solving of hard or ‘wicked’ spatial decision problems by non-GIS savvy stakeholders. Uses of Web 2.0 and social networking have recently been explored in order to increase PPGIS collaboration. These approaches have the potential to not only increase collaboration, but also the drawback of increasing the IT skills required to undertake PPGIS studies. In this research, we develop a compromise whereby we derive the 1) functional objectives of PPGIS-Web 2.0 integration, 2) scalability challenges of Web 2.0 deployments, and 3) the technical options available as evaluated for feasibility using the constraints within a ‘grassroots’ PPGIS community group environment. We develop a working prototype, Argoomap-GAE, that addresses the aforementioned based on the Google App Engine cloud provider and conclude with an in-situ evaluation of the new tool from the perspectives of both the end user of PPGIS system and the ‘grassroots’ PPGIS community group responsible for the deployment and management of the new system.