Next week in Washington, the Geotourism Summit, a partnership between National Geographic and Ashoka’s Changemakers unit, will celebrate the winners of the “Geotourism Challenge,” a global competition to unearth and support innovative ideas in tourism “that celebrate the distinct destinations of the world by honoring culture, cherishing history and enhancing the environment.”

One of the winners is a Spanish outfit called Wikiloc, whose innovation should be of more than passing interest to the news and knowledge world. Wikiloc happens to be concerned with tourism, yes (Wikiloc is short for “Wiki Location”) – but what it’s really about is upending traditional information models, democratizing the machinery of publishing, and getting more and better information to more people at lower cost. Sound familiar?

Wikiloc was started in 2006 by Jordi Ramot, a young software engineer who specializes professionally in Internet mapping and location-based services and who has a passion for outdoor sports and travel. He was looking for a way to easily share with friends notes about places he had enjoyed in his travels. So he designed a platform that allows anyone – backpacking teens, mountain bike clubs, local chambers of commerce – to describe and share their favorite hiking and biking trails on Google Maps. (Near where I live in New York, for example, folks have posted a kayaking route on the Hudson River, with photos of the views, and a hiking trail annotated with relevant markers.)

“It turned out,” Ramot wrote in his Changemakers entry, “that my needs where shared by many other outdoor enthusiasts and travelers worldwide. Soon many people started to create and share their own trails in Wikiloc. That was the beginning of the community.” Today, that community includes 100,000 people around the world.

It’s a classic inversion of the traditional knowledge model in this realm. Instead of reading a book written by a travel expert on kayaking and hiking trips in the Hudson Valley, we get the collected wisdom of the travel community. Instead of sharing details of a great trail with one or two friends, we share with … everyone, or at least anyone who’s interested. It works because there’s social value attached to sharing what you know; as Ramot explains, people contribute to Wikiloc not necessarily because they’ll make money (though more on that later) but because “the things you share will be used and appreciated by other people, and you get this sense of recognition – you are giving something, making your place in that community.”

There are, of course, at least two problems with inversion. The first is familiar to anyone who surfs the Internet: Getting as much information as possible from as many people as possible is not necessarily more efficient than getting considerably less information from a more select group of folks whose judgment you trust. The hikes I find on Wikiloc may not appear in any published guidebook – and I may discover, at my own risk, that there’s good reason. The implicit question – How do I know who and what to trust – demands, demands, at the least, some sort of community rating system, which Ramot is working on.

The second challenge is familiar, as well: How do we pay for this? As of now, Wikiloc is free for all; it costs nothing to publish information nor to read it. Ramot gets by on a trickle of Google AdSense revenue and the benevolence of his volunteer team (and, now, with $5,000 from the Geotourism Challenge).

Ramot understands that he’s sittingon some untapped revenue. There are Wikiloc users who operate B&Bs and describe trails that run past their homes, hoping to attract guests. “I know that is happening, but I haven’t thought about how to make these people pay.” Well, but he has, actually: He imagines a future iteration called Wikiloc Community Maps that allows anyone to add content and to concurrently promote their services. The idea is that the content has unique value that is realized by a unique affiliation: If you want to hike this fantastic trail, then you should stay at my perfectly situated home!

It could work. But why, I wonder, wouldn’t Ramot simply charge people to join the Wikiloc community? Isn’t that where the real value lies – the ability to join a global village of like-minded travelers who are interested in sharing distinctive information that enhances their tourism? Wouldn’t a lot of people pay, what, $10 a year for that? (For one example of this model, visit Village Soup, a platform that integrates print and online for community news.)

I don’t know for sure. But that’s certainly one direction the news & knowledge realm is headed. Information itself isn’t necessarily valuable. But the way communities engage with information toward productive action -- that can have very distinctive value, both social and financial.