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Can Digital Goods be Neutral? Evaluating OpenStreetMap’s equity through participatory data visualisation

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The project

Equity is a fundamental pillar of any digital innovation aiming to produce positive societal impacts that characterises any digital good.

Digital goods have typically been framed as mere technological artefacts, by consciously putting aside any human consideration to pursue a neutral approach. Conversely, Neutrality has been portrayed as a positive aspiration that prevents any form of bias that could pervert the fulfilment of the digital goods’ mission. We contend that, as well-intentioned as this aspiration may be, this apparently neutral standpoint that ignores how these goods are governed, may be inadvertently producing and reproducing new types of oppression and colonialism.

This is especially critical in projects whose community are extremely biased towards specific and hegemonic demographics, like the case of OSM. The election of OSM as study case is relevant and timely: OSM is the largest and more successful collaborative map of the world, and in February 2024, it was recognised as a global Digital Public Good by the UN-backed Digital Public Good Alliance. Like Wikipedia, OSM is based on principles of collaboration, openness and neutrality, and its data, contributed by a global community of volunteers, complements official data sources, and populates thousands of popular tools and services.

Our project examines and evaluates how the principle of neutrality driving many digital goods promotes or hampers equity by implementing a participatory process with Geochicas, a collective of women and LGBT+ mappers.

We will implement a transformative participatory process to evaluate and surface how minoritised demographics are involved, recognised, or excluded from data production and decision-making in OSM while empowering its participants. We will do so in two stages. First, we will identify “gender controversies” in OSM, this is, specific examples of existing or missing map features and the decisions leading to that which are problematic from a gendered lens. Second, we will combine lived experiences with expertise in data visualisation to co-design a tool to represent, quantify and communicate those gender controversies to enquiry on how neutrality is being operationalised in OSM.

We expect our findings to be returned to OSM and inform potential transformation in OSM’s governance, database, and representation that are guided by equity principles. More broadly, we expect the findings to be adapted to other cases of digital goods and initiate similar transformations.

Team

Dr , (PI)
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

Dr , (Co-I)
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

Dr Selene Yang, (Advisory Board)
Geochicas (Founder), Wikimedia Foundation, Research fellow at Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society

Dr Jorge Leon-Casero, (Advisory Board)
Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)

Dr Rachel Palmen, (Advisory Board)
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Prof. , (Advisory Board)
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

Funder

This project has been funded by

Creating Interfaces

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

An open source prototype for a visual interface to support research and Nexus engagements, designed collaborativelly as part of WP4, developed by the at the .

Aim

The aim of this tool is to provide an interface capable of understanding the implications of our decisions regarding food, and how can meals in kindergartens be turned into drivers for positive change for the health and the environment.

The visualisation tool may be helpful to perform tasks such as:

Identify highly rated meals and the lower rated meals
Identify meals with higher footprint
Identify ingredients with higher footprint

Which, ultimately, will lead to discussions and reflections on how food, energy and water are interlinked and how small changes in food can make a big impact.

Online demos

Food in Kindergartens, Slupsk (Poland):
Food waste, Wilmington (USA):
Local producers, Tulcea (Romania):

Source Code

Source Code:
Licence: GPL

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted in the Creating Interfaces project, funded within the framework of the Sustainable Global Urban Initiative (SUGI) Food-Water-Energy Nexus program. This program has been set up by the Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon, 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement # 730254 and the following national funding agencies: United Kingdom Research and Innovation funding was received through the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) grant ES/S002235/1; the National Science Center (NCN) of Poland funded this work under grant #UMO-2017/25/Z/HS6/03046.

Urban Commons

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Personal Research line about urban commons as alternative constructions of fairer cities and societies.

Exhibition: 44 Young International Architects

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Curator, along with Félix Arranz, of the exhibition held at the during the “Arquiset ‘07 week” which brings together the work of the first works built by 44 European, American and Iberian studios. In addition, the exhibition is located and complemented in Barcelona with a private exhibition, which includes debates and original material from the seven professional studios resident in Catalonia: , , , , , , Re- Arquitectos, which are included in the selection.

Also included in the exhibition is the projection of audiovisual material managed by AJAC, Agrupació de Joves Arquitectes de Catalunya.

The opening ceremony included an open debate in which Ferran Barenblit (director of CASM), Antonio Ortega (Coordinator of CASM activities), the seven studios resident in Catalonia and the artists sponsored by studios such as Rubén Martínez (YPSITE.net), Martí Anson, Octavi Comerón, among other artists listed in the Arxiu_Dossiers of the Centre d’Art SantaMòniCA.

Two central questions were addressed in the debate: The first question is “symptoms of the new versus the young: to what extent do you project -young architects- in an unlearned, unprejudiced way?” and the second explores “media strategies, social strategies, etc… legend and reality of the media success of architecture, in Barcelona, with respect to other manifestations and arts”. The debate will be moderated by Ferran Barenblit, director of CASM, Antonio Ortega, coordinator of CASM activities together with Félix Arranz and Carlos Cámara, from SCALAE ed. and the group of young architects and artists from Barcelona is invited to participate.

The selection of the 44 works and teams of young architects was proposed and resolved by a council made up of the curators of the event together with the architects: Victoria Acebo, Angel Alonso, Ada Yvars, Cristina Chu, Daniel Silberfaden, Edgar González, Patricia Muñiz, Luciano G. Alfaya, Susana Aparicio, José Juan Barba, Jorge G. de la Cámara, Josep Cargol, Juan Pablo Quintero, Michal Sulo, Esther Rovira, Alejandro Henriquez, Nicolás Valenzuela. Technical Secretariat: Laura Acosta (scalae ed.)

+arquitectura

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 12:05:33 +0100

Note

This text has been automatically translated until I find some time to rewrite it in English. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Ideologist, creator, editor, webmaster and community manager of +arquitectura. +arquitectura was a (virtual) meeting place where sharing knowledge, experiences, opinions, ideas, information… about architecture or simply “with the excuse of architecture”.

It is therefore a community that goes beyond the sum of individual actions, a place with the common denominator of architecture where you work as a team, each doing what they do best and what motivates them most, either as a member of the team or as a user. For that to be possible +arquitectura puts the means at its disposal (there are many more than you see today, just have an idea and ask) and its know-how, acquired during all the years of operation.

Objectives

Promote the relations between users to establish links at various levels: professional, formative, friendly…
Convert the relational into knowledge: give priority to personal opinion and dialogue in order to learn from each other.
Promote architecture and its agents, providing a space where to publish texts, articles, comments, photographs, projects… and tools to make it possible easily.
Encourage and guide teamwork
Create unique, quality content
To offer professional services whose object is the management of contents and the diffusion and promotion of achievements.

Motivation

The idea of making an architecture portal arose when I finished my degree and I felt quite disoriented when deciding what my next step in my working life should be: on the one hand I saw that there was a gap between what I had learned in my degree and what came before me, and on the other hand the information I had was rather little and confusing. And it was this that made me take the step towards an idea that had been on my mind for quite some time: I decided to create a place where I could gather all the information possible to guide others (and learn from the experience of other more experienced people, why not say it) in the world of architecture.

That portal should not be a simple compendium of information, regulations, advice… that would irremediably become obsolete in a period of time, but it should be a living place where all kinds of people, of any profession and place, who contribute their grain of sand with their doubts and advice, in short a place where we all learn from each other.

Three years have passed and those ideas are no longer a dream: the initial objectives are being fulfilled, the repercussion forecast of +arquitectura has been surpassed by far and continues to grow, and new objectives are proposed that are more in line with the reality of the moment of the web. The present line of work is to provide unique quality content on various facets of architecture and construction and enhance a community that participates and feels identified with the portal. Time will tell if the objectives are achieved or if all that remains a simple dream.

Acknowledgements

+architecture has been one of the 28 works selected for the exhibition and catalogue of the program Arquia/Próxima 2008, convened by the Fundación Caja de Arquitectos.

Differential points

These are some of the sections created with the aim of having original and quality content while seeking to foster community:

The Challenge: a kind of contest (without prize) consisting of a user publishing a photo of a part of a work and the rest of users had to guess what it was based on yes/no questions. Whoever guessed the challenge had to publish information about the building and prepare the next challenge.
arch.Maaik: publication of the daily comic strip on architecture by the Belgian architect and draftsman Maaik Hermans (see post "Arch.Maaik en +arquitectura"), translated into Spanish by Laura Acosta>
The other architects and The non-architects, two sister sections that had the objective of showing the lesser known and institutionalized face of architecture from structured questionnaires made to architects who are not dedicated to building and to non-architects professionals who work in the world of architecture, respectively (See "Talking about architects, architecture and experiences").
Quotes and phrases from known architects.

Evolution and Closure

During its 9 years of life +arquitectura has changed a lot, both in design, functionalities, community, participation and sections, showing an evolution and exponential growth whose peak was in 2008 and mid 2009, with the consolidation of a stable and participatory community, sections such as ’the challenge’ or humorous daily strip, and, later, ‘The other architects’. At the end of 2009, with the rise of social networks and the consolidation of the blogs themselves, the decline of the forums began, and +arquitectura was no exception (see post “+arquitectura, one year later”). In spite of the attempts to reinvent the web so that the community did not depend solely on the forums, the participation of third parties decreased considerably, creating a snowball effect from which it would never recover. Finally, it closed on January 28, 2013 due to continuous hacking that turned it into an online shop of illegal medicines ( )