CartoSpot development is lead by José P. Gómez Barrón S., PhD, with the goal of creating the most interoperable, inclusive, and user-friendly map-based digital participatory platform, designed to make it easy for anyone to build and deploy collaborative and open mapping communities and groups. CartoSpot is integrating 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 continuously 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, CartoSpot has been adopted by several research teams at the Spatial Dynamics Lab of University College Dublin, shaping its continuous improvements while being used in various research and 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