Mapeo / CoMapeo

Mapeo — and its next-generation rebuild CoMapeo — is Awana Digital's answer to a hard question: how does a community map and monitor its own territory when the internet is absent, unreliable, or unsafe? The tools run entirely on phones, sync peer-to-peer between devices, and keep the data owned by the community — there is no server unless the community wants one.

The proof is consequential: the Waorani of Pastaza, Ecuador mapped twenty villages' territory with Mapeo starting in 2015, and their maps entered evidence in the 2019 lawsuit in which Ecuador's courts blocked an oil concession on Waorani land. Awana counts hundreds of frontline communities using its tools across dozens of countries.

GPL-3.0, actively developed. For neighborhoods, the offline-first, community-owned architecture matters most exactly when the cloud is the wrong place for the data.

Neighborhood remix: tenants photo-documenting housing-code violations building by building, syncing phone-to-phone at the tenants' meeting, and sharing only what they decide to share, when they decide to share it.

Details

• maker: Awana Digital
• license: GPL-3.0 (CoMapeo Mobile)
• repo url: https://github.com/digidem/comapeo-mobile
• remix idea: Tenant documentation that syncs phone-to-phone and shares only on the tenants' terms.
• practice kind: tool