In an earlier post, we discussed some of the wonderful ways communities are harnessing Google Maps, and now we will look at how governments use them. Government Google maps tend to be official, formal, controlled, and with a fixed budget. This has a somewhat homogenizing effect on the maps governments produce; they tend to have predictable features and reliable, if limited content.
New South Wales Government
This map showcases the investments of the New South Wales government across a range of categories including, education, energy, health, public order and safety, transport and water. Transport and education seem to be the two main focuses at the moment. Like many other maps, it can be filtered to display only certain types of projects.
The Google map’s importance to this site is emphasized by the way it’s put at the core of everything. It features prominently on the home page, to offer a good jumping off point for visitors looking to find out more about the NSW investments. There are links to articles about the investments under the map and in the sidebar, further supporting it. These, together with the map, give a very good bird’s eye view of the whole project.
Redbridge Interactive Map
Redbridge is a district of Greater London. It’s interactive map is designed to inform people of local services, including government, social and religious services.
The map can only display one filter at a time, which is just as well because all the map markers are identical little purple pins, no matter what category they relate to. A very nice feature of the map is how well it connects to information about public transport. Each item on the Redbridge map contains a link to very specific information on the Transport for London site, a comprehensive public transport tool.
Unlike most government Google maps, there is a nice feedback option on the map as well, so communication between government and citizen is not an entirely one way street. Left clicking an open area of the map opens an option to report an incident, such a pothole, litter or an abandoned vehicle. Graffiti can also be reported, and flagged for destruction, unlike the Street Art Locator, which digitally curates it instead. A similar process on a digital map, but with very different end goals.
Auckland City Council
Dormant volcanoes nestle in among the city streets in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand. This map displays council services and information for the area.
One unusual feature of this map is that it zooms appropriately to show all flags for any given category. While this prevents any map item from being over-looked, it also has the effect of making it very difficult to compare more than one type of service. Only one set of items can be displayed at a time, so community halls can’t easily be compared with, for example, alcohol ban areas. As a result, the zoom which occurs every time a new category is selected, can have a disorientating effect.
Conclusion
Government Google Maps have a quite different set of goals than most Community Google Maps. The quality and reliability of the information provided is more important than the sheer quantity available through the croud-sourcing mechanisms of many community maps. Some goverment maps do allow for user feedback, but they draw the line at user content.
The top-down structure underlying government maps reveals itself in the details of the map. They often feature carefully numbered items, and show restraint in the type and number of map locations highlighted. Community maps, in contrast, are developed via a bottom-up type of structure and tend to be a perpetual work in progress which never reach a fully “finished” state. Government maps have a much lower chance of incorrect information and vandalism than community maps, which have open authorship, and this makes the information contained in them much more trustworthy, if less frequently updated.
Tags: accessibility, Google Maps, government, usability