GIS has long been seen as a professional and complex technology — both technically and conceptually. While WebGIS has made it more accessible, it still remains challenging for non-experts, especially for citizens to quickly learn, participate, and create meaningful outputs within a short time.

At the same time, local governments — one of the major GIS users — are increasingly looking for new ways to communicate and co-create with their citizens. From disaster prevention planning to urban redevelopment, there is a growing demand to make maps and data a medium for dialogue, not a technical barrier.

In this talk, I will introduce several case studies demonstrating how our team leverages the Re:Earth Visualizer plugin ecosystem together with Re:Earth CMS to design lightweight and intuitive WebGIS applications for citizen participation workshops. These applications transform GIS into a tool for collaboration, storytelling, and civic engagement, helping governments and citizens engage in complex yet enjoyable forms of spatial communication.