State of the Collaborative Atlas: Platial is 2 months old!

We thought our two month anniversary was a good time to share some early results and the reason for our existence.

Platial is building a free Collaborative Atlas to bridge people, neighborhoods and nations and enable people to document experience through geography. We want to illustrate a truly post geo-political world through the voices of its Citizens.

We've taken the first step toward this mission with a platform for adding, storing, sharing, discovering Places and creating custom maps. We recently passed 100,000 Places from partners and our founding members and we're working every day at making our system and experience better and better.

Our Places and Maps range from fairtrade, alternative fuel, people who have changed the world, music tours, UNESCO heritage sites, kid-friendly, gay-friendly, dog-friendly locations and just about anything else people find worthy of contributing.

We're working with the geo community, academics and urban planners in the hopes of using this data to allow all of us to gain some insights about our world.

Our members have been truly fantastic in helping us learn what they want, need and what works/doesn't work about Platial. Please keep the feedback and inspiration coming.

Two weeks ago, we went into deep dev mode again to incorporate all of this incredible feedback and next week we will release the fruits of our collective labor. We've deployed new features, content partners and bug fixes sometimes hourly in the past two months, but we think this next release will be special. Over the coming months we''ll continue to build out this platform and learn from our members.

A Little About Our Team
Platial is a team of nine place adoring engineers, PhDs, entrepreneurs and user advocates based in and around Portland & Boston.
Anselm Hook (Thingster, P2P Maps, Civic Actions,CivicMaps, CivicMaps Tile Engine, Locative.net, Ning)
Chris Goad (MapBureau, Longtime geo geek and visionary who wrote the FABL language)
Jay Hargis (Ultimate Bet, JCal, JPX-WDDX)
Jake Olsen (Urbanverb, Architectural Heritage Center)
Jason Wilson (0009, HERE game, Community-centric Marketing, Tall-bikes, video, psychogeography)
Di-Ann Eisnor (Eisnor Interactive, Community-centric Marketing, HERE game)
Tracy Rolling Brunar (La Superette, LiveJournal Dolls, International Scavenger Hunt)
Chris Henderson (Music like this and that)
Paige Saez (Biker, artist, friend who showed up one day because she had become our first obsessed user and hasn't left since.)

A Few Notable Maps:
NY Street Food
Coldplay tour + hostels + fairtrade
Knitting
Women Who Changed the World
Biodiesel
Weird Things That Happened to Me
Hopeless Romantic
Fairtrade
Best Bike Spots Toronto
Political Cartoon Controversy

It's interesting to see how people have been telling stories through these maps. We have no idea how people will use Platial over time but I can't wait to see.