Abstract Public Participation and Community Access to Technology as a Force for Change and Development Eng. Mahmoud Ramadan SURADEC, GIS and Engineering Management Aleppo, Syria Email: suradec@scs-net.org Dr.Sami Makdisi SURADEC, Syria Abstract The most important question rising today in urban management is, the possibility to fill the gap between urbanites and their representatives in the city council, which the latter has placed upon the task of urban management, guaranteeing security, living standards, and equality between urbanites to access health and social services. It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it, and then apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. The concept of public participation using GIS has much hidden potential to utilize the community's power. This can also help the various sectors of community in the melting pot process as they range from planners, academics, technicians and activists to everyday people, NGO's , public and private sectors . It also opens up new horizons for experts and decision makers to enable the society and marginalized category of society to utilize their role beginning from a bottom-up strategy making use of information technology and networking in the age of information. These systems can be used as an efficient tool to support community participation on a number of levels, from the right to access information to the right to object, define priorities, participate in the planning process, define work programs, finally reaching the participation in the decision process through the data provided during workshops or social qualitative surveys. GIS will reflect these visually in a geographical limit leaving no place for doubt. The work paper, I propose will include a selected set of situations that have elaborated the concept of community participation benefiting from the applications of GIS highlighting environmental management, planning, development, and finally putting the poor on the map.