There are four different developments that have led to the evolution of collaborative mapping: 1. Introduction of location-aware devices 2. Emergence of social software 3. Blogging revolution 4. Adoption of Opensource and interoperability

Whereas, space.frot.org/ proposes that:

four more different developments that have led to the evolution of collaborative mapping 1. machine meaningfulness of geospatial data 2. open data, free use 3. the psychogeographic revival 4. echelon for everyone - monitoring and data sharing, privacy and data mining