Data Visualisation |

Co-designing participatory data visualizations to evaluate OpenStreetMap’s equity: The Good, The Neutral and The Ugly

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

This talk will present the implementation of a participatory codesign process to surface how neutrality is operationalised in OpenStreetMap [OSM] as well as some preliminary results about how it is succeeding or failing to foster equity and inclusion.

OSM is the largest and more successful collaborative map of the world. Like Wikipedia, it is based on principles of participation, openness, and neutrality to “map the world as it exists” . To that end, more than 10 million volunteers from different geographies and backgrounds contribute with their local knowledge to add new map features or improve existing ones. Its data, covering the entire globe, is so exhaustive and precise that it complements official data sources and populates thousands of tools and popular services. Moreover, the UN-backed Digital Public Good Alliance recognised in February 2024 OSM as a global Digital Public Good. Enquiring about the world-views embedded in such a crucial project and their mechanisms to avoid inequities against vulnerable communities is critical to understand the values that it produces and reproduces. This is especially relevant in the case of OSM for two reasons. First, because maps shape reality as much as they are shaped by it, for example by influencing the perception of the world, exerting political power and control or affecting mobility, accessibility and consumption patterns, among others. Second, because OSM’s community is estimated to be highly biased towards specific and hegemonic demographics, where white men from Europe and the US are overrepresented.

Our interdisciplinary research draws from critical geography and feminism to investigate how neutrality can be applied to either support or hinder equity. To achieve this, we are teaming up with Geochicas, a community-led organization from Latin America whose mission is to close the gender gap in the OSM community. Together, we are implementing a transformative participatory process aimed at co-designing data visualizations.

For us, data visualizations are not just an output to communicate findings, but a research method used to mediate and provoke ideas, discussions, and reactions that arise from thinking with and about data and its representation, while producing and exploring the data and designing a visualization. Conversely, we understand participation and co-design as a way to consider the particularities of data, tasks, users, context of use and world-views of the participants, which is a condition for creating visualizations which are actually capable of being transformative. The resulting visualizations will be different insofar they will be based on lived experiences and will be informed by feminist principles. As a result, they will be better suited to assess how minoritized demographics—such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—are involved, recognized, or excluded in data production and decision-making within OSM, while also empowering our participants.

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.

Maps, world-views and neutrality: squaring the circle?

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Map-making is a serious business. There’s a science devoted to that, and only highly specialised companies and organisations can endeavour to translate every feature on Earth into a feature on a map with the right size and location. But that’s what make maps reliable, too. So much so that, besides being part of our everyday lives, scientists use them to assess the effects of drought and deforestation, identify migration patterns or making predictions, amongst others. And yet, all maps are wrong. All of them make assumptions on how the world is or should be, and in so doing, maps have particular built-in world views and become political. They define what is included and what is not, what can and can’t be done with them, and the stories that they convey. In other words: maps shape the world as much as they are shaped by them. In this talk, we will explain how maps are made to understand how they have been used to exert power and how they are still doing so. We will then focus on OpenStreetMap, a collective effort to “map the world as it is”, and how are they succeeding or failing in doing so in an equitable way.

Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:53:19 +0000

Visualisation tool for a grounded FEW Nexus

Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.