The Guardian is experimenting with crowd-sourcing the Pope’s visit to the UK. Our team of correspondents, bloggers, photographers and columnists will be covering most dimensions of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip - as will an army of hundreds of agency journalists and rolling news television crews pursuing his every step.

But the mainstream media cannot be everywhere at once. This CrowdMap aims to combine verified reports from the Guardian and other media with potentially invaluable information supplied by people like you, who simply see, hear or record something they think is relevant about the Papal visit. 

The platform we’re testing is provided by Ushahidi, which was first developed to allow cititzens to map incidents when ethnic violence erupted in Kenya in late 2007. It has been used across the world, mainly to sort data during humanitarian or environmental crises, such as the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. Within four days, Ushahidi was said  to have received more than 100,000 reports from the ground.

The tool works when there are lots of people witnessing the same large event. 

It works like this: you send us information, either by email, text message or Twitter (simply use #papalmap) or the web. You can send anything, but we’re particularly interested in incidents (things that “happen”) as well as insights from people who, for whatever reason, might find themselves at the right place at the right time, spotting something that the Papal entourage of global media simply miss.

The snippet of information could be anything, from problems with queues into Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, where the Pope will preside over a mass tonight, to a photograph of Popemobile passing Holywrood Palace or a report of an incident during the protest march through Whitehall against the visit on Saturday.

Please do send us reports - the more concise the better.  Our policy is not to approve every report; information that we judge to be a duplicate or hoax will obviously not appear on the map. Similarly, anything we deem offensive, or information that is considered irrelevant or just not that interesting, will also be edited out. 

But we’ll try to approve most reports, however small. A quirky observation or uploaded video can grow into an important news story. We may try to contact you to check your credibility, seek clarification or verify the information you are supplying. The Guardian cannot vouch for the reliability of every posting on the map, but we will see if we can make this an interesting source of unique takes on the Pope’s visit that, frankly, you are probably not going to find elsewhere.

@paul__lewis