CartoSpot is being developed by José P. Gómez Barrón S., PhD, with the goal of creating the most interoperable, inclusive, and user-friendly map-based participatory platform, designed to make it easy for anyone to build and deploy collaborative and open mapping communities and groups. It is the result of more than 10 years of work and research in crowdsourcing systems, open-source web mapping technologies, gamification, and public participation engagement and dynamics. The platform’s design and ongoing development are based on the research in socio-technical design of  Volunteered Geographic Information Systems (VGIS), which was the central focus of my thesis in Geomatics Engineering, as well as the work conducted between 2013 and 2019 at the Mercator Research Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Since 2021, thanks to the support of the Spatial Dynamics Lab at University College Dublin, where I currently conduct my research, CartoSpot has continued to evolve and has been used in various European projects such as:

• UCD Meitheal Mapping
• INTERVAL: Map Our Trees!
• NBSINFRA: Shaping Fingal’s Sustainable Future
• HeritACT: ParticiMap Tool
• Beach & Dunes For Climate Action: I like Dunes!
• SCORE: Community Geosurveys