Collaborate on Your Maps

With the Collaborate feature in Google Maps, you can create a map and allow others to edit your map. If you haven't already created your own map, learn how to do so with our Creating Maps using the My Maps Tab tutorial. Some ways in which collaborating on a map may be helpful to your organization include:

• Map your chapter locations and allow each chapter to add project site locations to a collective map
• Allow all your volunteers to add themselves to your volunteer map

To demonstrate how to collaborate on a map, we've created a map showing a hypothetical Adopt-a-Bike-Route program. Local cycling clubs who are frequently riding popular Bay Area roads choose a route that they ride on often and clean up trash and debris along the way as they ride. In order to prevent two groups cleaning up the same roads, they specify which roads they are cleaning up and collaborate on the map, allowing multiple people to edit the same map.

The map owner creates a map and selects who can edit the map. Those people can then add or remove marked locations, paths or regions in a map visible to all Google Maps users.

Tutorial Contents:

• Prerequisites
• Stop, collaborate, and listen
• Discussion & feedback
• What's next?

Prerequisites

• Absolutely no programming skills needed!
• You will need the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer. Download it here. (It's free!)

Stop, collaborate and listen

1. Go to Google Maps and sign in with your Google Account. If you don't have a Google Account, sign up here.

2. Create a new map or open a map you've created earlier. Choose the map that you want to allow others to collaborate on.

3. Click Collaborate in the lower left panel.

4. You'll see a dialog box pop up:

Manage your collaborators and invite others to edit your map.

• Add collaborators by entering their email addresses (separated by commas) in the upper left box
• Customize an optional invitation email that will be sent to new collaborators
• If you'd like collaborators to be able to invite other collaborators, you can check the box in the upper right corner
• Select "Allow anyone to edit this map" if you'd like any Google Maps user to be able to contribute to your map
• As the map owner, you can remove collaborators by clicking on the "Remove" link next to a collaborator's name on the lower right side. Click on "remove all" to stop collaborating on your map

Discussion & Feedback

Have questions about this tutorial? Want to give us some feedback? Visit the Google Earth Outreach Discussion Group to discuss it with others.

What's Next?

• Go to next tutorial: Embedding Maps into a Website
• See all tutorials and tools available at Earth Outreach.
• Go back to main tutorial page.