This paper will present past progress and future plans for MapStory.org, a platform that empowers a global community to organize knowledge about the world spatially and temporally, rather than encyclopedically as Wikipedia has done so well. MapStory launched a prototype in January 2013 and has since been tested by 1500 people, viewed by over 120 million across six continents, and used by major publications like the Washington Post and Vox. In early 2015 MapStory will launch as a Beta with new features developed during the prototyping process, such as distributed versioned editing for data and a new composer for 'spatio-temporal narratives'. This short paper will discuss how we've used open source geospatial components to build MapStory and how it can be deployed by humanities scholars, journalists, students and the general public to help us all better understand how our world evolves over time - at hyper local and global scales.
