One Year of Co-design

By Karissa McKelvey Category blogPosted on:

author: Karissa McKelvey
date: 2020-07-29
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title: One Year of Co-design
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categories: – blog
image: https://images.digital-democracy.org/assets/md-obs-1600@2x.png

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Over the past year, we’ve focused on critical and fundamental improvements to
MAPEO, and are pleased to announce the release of version 5. Introducing MAPEO
Mobile in 2018 brought user-centered offline GIS technology to the fingertips
of our local partners in the Amazon. In the last two years, we have heard
valuable input and experiences from community monitors and local technicians
working to protect territories across the Amazon and SE Asia. We have learned
so much about how the tools can be used and what barriers we need to knock down
to make MAPEO work for the people who need it most.

The valuable input and experiences shared by community monitors and local
technicians working to protect Kofan Territory in Ecuador, the Pastaza, Tigre,
and Corrientes river basins in Northern Peru, the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve
in Madre de Dios, Peru and partners in SE Asia, from across the Mekong Valley
who are beginning to pilot MAPEO has been invaluable for recentering user needs
and priorities.

We are excited to provide our local partners and other MAPEO users a much
easier way to onboard more participants into customized community mapping and
monitoring projects and amplify community engagement in their activities. The
new configuration loader in MAPEO mobile is an example of a feature that we
prioritized to meet partner needs and solve the challenge of adding users to
a project when members of the Dd team are not there.

MAPEO users are definitely inspired by using the tools and have amazing ideas
that we continue to document as possible new features. We forge on, continuing
MAPEO development and looking forward to realizing innovations that have impact
where it is needed most.

We’ve also spent time creating more resources in our public user guide to make it easier to get started using MAPEO. Anyone can suggest edits to the guide, including the ecosystem of organizations and individuals that contribute to MAPEO’s usability in a multitude of contexts.

You can download the latest MAPEO at https://mapeo.app. MAPEO for Android is available on the Google Play store. If you don’t have access to the play store, you can also install MAPEO manually by downloading the Android APK.