While I’m out on the trails the GPS receiver displays the shortest distance to the geocache.  This frequently causes me to do what geocachers call bushwhacking which is where you make a beeline for the geocache through the brush.  This is neither environmentally sound or necessarily the easiest path to the geocache.   What I need is a way to display the trail on my GPS receiver.  This is where Gregory Pleau comes in.  Gregory is an avid geocacher with over 3800 finds.  After one too many bushwhacking excursions Gregory decided to put his technical abilities to good use and create trail maps for his GPSr.

There are a number of commercially available trail map solutions for popular GPSr but this trail map is different.  These maps are created by the geocaching user community in something that has be referred to as crowdsourcing.  This is where a large group of interest parties get together and share information, resources or skills, in order to create something new. Wikipedia is a more popular example of a crowdsourced solution.

The maps made available through Gregory’s Ontario Trails Project are free.   There are a variety of ways to get the maps for the various GPSr units that are  out there.   Visit his site for full instructions.

Here is a case where members of a community can contribute a small piece of information that their GPS captures anyway and contribute to the creation of a useful tool.  What other helpful tools can be created when passion meets expertise and is supported by a like-minded crowd?