At the beginning of this summer, I wrote a rant about Romania not being properly indexed on Google Maps. A friend noticed it on Facebook, and asked me if I could help start something about this using the Causes application.
A few months flew by, and the cause "Google! Put Romania On Your Maps!" has 10,208 members as of the time of this post. The cause has sparked others (including a petition on Twitter, to which Google responded), and has been mentioned in the Romanian press and even on the Google Lat Long Blog.
And from that very post on Google's blog comes the company's sheer brilliance: they have an application called Google Map Maker, which allows users to create and/or edit user-generated maps of any given area, based on their own local knowledge. And they just opened it up for Romania.
Now, I didn't exactly know how this works (and most importantly how this crowd-sourced content actually makes it to Google Maps itself), and it just so happened that Jen, a Maps Community Organizer at Google, left some helpful comments right on this blog (you can never, ever say that Google isn't on top of its game when it comes to communication).
Here's how the whole thing goes:
- Visit Google Map Maker and search for, let's say, Bucharest
- Add or edit (more about this and a walkthrough in their Help section). As you create or moderate, others will pitch in with feedback (which you'll be notified about via e-mail).
- How does your stuff get to Google Maps (and its API)? There are processes called data transfers, which are done at a certain period of time - the last one was on May 24th - more here - Romania should be on the list next time.



