Learn

This section is not about Mapsurvey. It is about the work: asking people where things happen, getting answers that mean something, and reading them honestly. The essays draw on public-participation GIS (PPGIS) research and on the surveys that have run on Mapsurvey, and each links to the how-to guide that applies when you are ready to build.

Planned essays, in reading order:

1. What participatory mapping is, and when it beats a plain survey
2. Designing a map survey
3. Writing questions people can answer on a map
4. Recruiting respondents: who shows up, who doesn’t, and what to do about it
5. Reading the results: from pins to patterns
6. Presenting results back to the public
7. Privacy and ethics
8. Use cases from real surveys

The design rules behind essays 2 and 3 are maintained in the open, with their sources, in the Mapsurvey repository: survey-design-rules.md.