On a peak construction day in Minnesota, Gopher State One Call (GSOC) processes as many as 7,000 locate requests. Each one triggers a familiar chain: utilities dispatch crews to spray paint and stake flags at the dig site, marking their buried infrastructure before excavators break ground. For nearly four decades, this is how the industry has operated, and for nearly four decades, it has been one of the reasons pipes and other infrastructure get hit.
The markings tell you where one operator’s infrastructure runs. But underground, nothing belongs to just one operator. Gas lines share corridors with electric conduits, water mains cross beneath fiber runs, and municipal systems thread through it all. The fundamental problem is structural: each utility responds to a ticket for its own assets only, and no one in the process has a view of what all operators have in the ground at a given site. The excavator working that job is making decisions from an incomplete picture.
The consequences are measurable and they are not improving. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) estimates that damage to underground infrastructure costs the nation $30 billion annually. In Minnesota alone, the state’s Office of Pipeline Safety recorded 1,663 gas line strikes in 2024, and that is just one utility type. Nationally, the CGA’s own index, which tracks damage prevention progress toward its “50-in-5” goal of cutting damage rates in half, moved in the wrong direction in 2024, rising from 94.0 to 96.7. The industry is not on track. These are not failures of technology. Each facility operator maintains its own records of its buried assets. The data exists. It simply never leaves the organization.
That is the problem FuzionView was built to solve. Not better locating technology. Not smarter spray paint. The problem of sharing.
From Conversation to Collaboration
In 2017, GSOC reached out to the Emergency Preparedness Committee (EPC) of the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council (MGAC) with a straightforward question: could the GIS tools the utility community had been quietly building for decades be applied effectively to damage prevention? The answer was complicated enough that it took three years of conversation to fully articulate.
What those conversations revealed was that the barriers were not technical. The web service protocols existed. The encryption tools existed. What did not exist was a framework that addressed the real obstacle: facility operators were not going to open their proprietary infrastructure data to a centralized repository, and no one could reasonably ask them to.
In early 2020, those conversations formalized into the Underground Utilities Mapping Project Team (UUMPT), a vendor-neutral group of 35 volunteers from across the public-private spectrum, working under the EPC to design a system that could share the view without sharing the data. That distinction would become FuzionView’s defining feature, and the key to unlocking facility operator participation.
In October 2022, the UUMPT reached a milestone no one in the industry had achieved before: a successful demonstration of a prototype capable of pulling a real-time, unified map view of all underground infrastructure within a designated dig area. First in the nation. Built by community consensus.
Development was funded by a coalition that itself reflected the community-driven nature of the effort: the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, GSOC, CGA, One Call Concepts (OCC), and SharedGeo. GSOC subsequently contracted SharedGeo, a Minnesota-based geospatial research and development nonprofit, to build the production version. FuzionView was released as open-source software in early 2026, meaning no vendor owns it, no single organization controls its roadmap. And as community sponsored software, any 811 center in the country can adopt it without concern for cost or restrictions on use.
What It Does
When a dig ticket is submitted through an 811 system, FuzionView uses the geographic coordinates of the excavation site to automatically query each participating facility operator’s GIS environment. The underlying data does not move. It remains with each operator and generates a secure, unified map view of every participating operator’s underground infrastructure within that specific dig site.
FuzionView does not replace the One Call process. It supplements it. All existing laws and requirements remain in place. What changes is the level of insight available to everyone working within that process.
Access is tightly controlled. Only users operating under a formal agreement with the 811 center can view the map, and only within the dig site boundary. When the ticket expires, the data disappears. Facility operators retain full control and can disconnect at any time. The system has passed a rigorous independent security review and exceeds federal geospatial data standards.
Proof That It Works
The CGA featured FuzionView in a Next Practices Case Study, recognizing it as a significant step toward leveraging existing technology to improve the 811 process. That recognition has taken on new urgency. The 2024 CGA DIRT Report explicitly calls on facility owners to “share 811 ticket-level facility maps with excavators” as a priority recommendation for reducing damage rates. FuzionView is that recommendation, built and operational. The Association of Minnesota Counties, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and MGAC have all endorsed the effort. For context on the scale of what shared underground visibility can deliver: the United Kingdom’s National Underground Asset Register, a comparable initiative now in public beta, is projected to deliver at least £400 million annually in efficiency gains and reduced infrastructure damage.
The Question No One Wants to Answer
FuzionView is now live. GSOC is actively onboarding facility operators, and the software has been fully integrated into the OCC 811 system. Other notification centers across the country are taking notice.
But the honest question, the one the UUMPT has been asking since 2020, is whether the broader industry is willing to step up. There are no laws preventing a facility operator from connecting their data. There are no regulatory obstacles to participation. FuzionView does not ask for ownership of anything. It asks for visibility, temporarily, within the boundary of a dig ticket. The remaining barrier is, in plain terms, a matter of corporate willingness to help solve a well-documented problem.
What Comes Next
Because FuzionView is open-source, its future depends on community investment. A Project Leadership Team is now forming to guide ongoing development and sustain three tiers of support: maintenance and security at the foundational level, major platform improvements at the next, and accelerated innovation at the top, including 3D visualization, augmented reality integration, and expanded field data collection capabilities.
The regulatory environment is moving in the same direction. Minnesota’s updated Statute 216D now requires larger facility operators to use geospatial location information for as-built drawings of newly installed or abandoned facilities, a mandate that aligns directly with the data practices FuzionView is built to connect.
Organizations can support the effort through a consortium model that gives participants a voice in directing development priorities. Donations can also be made directly through FuzionView.org, where full technical documentation, onboarding materials, and supporting fact sheets are available for facility operators, locators, excavators, and 811 centers ready to take the next step.
This is not a product being delivered to the industry. It is infrastructure being built by it. The technology exists. The legal framework is clear. The platform is live and open to any community willing to use it. What the damage prevention industry does from here is its own answer to a question it has been deferring long enough.
Mike Sovereign is Program Manager at SharedGeo, a Minnesota-based geospatial research and development nonprofit. He can be reached at 612-760-7275 or msovereign@sharedgeo.org.