Feminism |

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

Digital Privacy Workshop: a chronicle

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, I attended to a workshop aimed to discuss, learn and raise awareness on our Digital Privacy, organized by , a group of “feminist cybersecurity advocates and researchers seeking to engage with groups excluded from tech”. I didn’t know much about the event nor the organizers when I signed up, but I was sure I would enjoy it. As an opensource advocate who is also concerned about how our private data can be (and it is) used by companies and governments, I was seduced by the topic and, above all, by their feminist approach as well as their hybrid profile, halfway between activism and academia. These two topics would soon be made evident.

We were first welcomed by a group of very friendly people who handed out an information sheet, introducing themselves and the event, and a participant agreement which we had to return signed if we wanted to take part into the research they are conducting. Because, yes, as they (sorry for not remembering your names, guys) soon explained at the welcome speech, the workshop was also part of an action-research¹ project within the , funded by a research grant from UK Research & Innovation. As they kindly and thoroughly explained, this meant that we could opt to contribute to the research by sharing our opinions and data. I was positively surprised on their feminist approach (as they stated it) in dealing with that, not only they were very transparent, but they also offered options for those willing to take part into the workshop while not taking part into the research, which I believe is a very coherent behaviour due to the topic (after all they would be dealing with private data). Kudos for them!

Soon after the introduction, we participated in an open discussion through a questionnaire we could interact with in real-time through , in which we assessed our demographics (we were around 20 people from all ages -more on gender below), motivations, prior knowledge on the topic and concerns on digital privacy. This last question led to the next phase, in which we divided into smaller groups, where an IT person took note of our interventions and answered the questions that arose, to further discuss our fears and interests. After this first round of discussion, we were introduced to the , a really thorough yet accessible guide written by Noah Kelley from which introduces the foundations of key areas and provides a series of free/libre tools grouped around the following topics: Anonymity, Hacking, Data, Phones, and Social. At a personal level it helped me to understand the insides of tools that I was already using, such a , tools I knew existed, such as , or simply learnt of the existence of new and intersting ones such as .

The last part of the workshop consisted of several focus groups (some of which -for those who agreed to take part in the research- were recorded) in which a researcher introduced several topics (like how do we feel regarding cybersecurity, how should be the best app/service for us? ) which we discussed between us and in turn opened new related topics such as security and gender and age, the role of governments and companies… I really enjoyed this part, as thorough the questions and answers we had profound discussions that I had honestly never thought about before so specifically. From time to time, we made short breaks to share some conclusions with the other groups and what people had written on the screen through the menti app. To make things even better, pizza was served for us all!

So that’s grosso modo, how a group of around 20 people spent 3 hours on a Friday evening talking, learning and sharing on cybersecurity, and data privacy and, most of all, having a great time together. As I said before, I was certain that I would enjoy the workshop, but I have to admit that it was completely different from what I had expected and, as a result, it was much better than I thought. At this point, I would like to thank Reconfigure for the organization of the event and wish them great success with their research. I am willing to know more about it, about them and about their results (and will be also willing to take part in it if there is a chance).

Some random thoughts before finishing:

All the attendees (except me) were females, a demographic which is completely reverse to any other event on technology or cybersecurity that I have previously attended to. While I liked that, I could not help but wonder if the fact that the event was labelled as “feminist” not only encouraged women to come but also discouraged men to do so. If that was true, that’s definitely something we (men) need to address to understand that feminism is not something alien to us but also concerns us all.
The organizers made a great effort on creating a safe-space where nobody could feel threatened or treated with contempt. In that regard, I found their approach on the topic of cybersecurity to be very appropriate given their context, goals and audience: instead of having an expert lecturing us on cybersecurity issues, we had a more peer-to-peer experience in which we all learnt from the others as equals. This is also novel in terms that usually cybersecurity issues are treated as common-sense rules which are anything but common and users are blamed by default for any “wrong” behaviour that can lead to security breaches.
The place (Oxford’s ) provided just the right atmosphere for such an event.
The pizzas were delicious! (probably that contributed to the fact that they were soon devoured).
At a personal level, I also enjoyed the fact that my partner also attended to the workshop (in fact, it was her who told me about the workshop, so thank you for doing so!) and since she was in another group, we kept the conversation even after we left the workshop. This means not only that we both enjoyed it but that Reconfigure made a great job with their workshop, so thanks again for that!

I didn’t know about it when I signed up, and this was a very positive surprise. Since I have had the opportunity to design (and to take part into) an action-research project on urban mobility and disabilities (you can read about it ), I considered very positive to learn from other fellow colleagues who come from a very different context. ↩︎

A brief note on maps and feminism

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As those who know me well know, : I like to see them, I like to make them and I like to use them to give answers to complex questions. I like the fact that you can create maps about almost anything. But surely, what I like most about them is that they are unique tools to show unnoticed realities that help to understand all types of phenomena. Some common (and, to some extent, hackneyed) examples of such maps are those used to explain the spread of diseases¹, the , social inequality, or . However, we can map any topic we can think of, and there are examples no less well known but important (on the contrary!), such as gender inequality.

That is why today, , I wanted to highlight the excellent work they have done at ², with the project .

Women’s streets is paradigmatic because it makes a novel and necessary reading of an everyday reality for most of us who live in urban environments: the street nomenclator. By identifying the streets of some cities in Spain and Latin America whose names refer to women, and comparing it with the streets whose name refers to a men, they show that there is a great biass in the representation of women in public space. This is by no means trivial: since street names are often a way of celebrating (and recounting) the culture of a place by assigning names to influential and notable people or landmarks that have marked history, such unequal gender representation evidences that the importance of women is systematically silenced, which contributes to building a story in which women have barely had an important role (or worthy of public recognition) in the historical and cultural development of our society, which is clearly incorrect.

Another aspect of the project is to show how many of the women after whom a street is named have an article in the wikipedia (without evaluating its content). This also evidences that there is yet another gender gap which is not just a local matter of a few cities.

On the other hand, I cannot help but pointing out another issue that I love about the project (and for which I congratulate , who has led its development), and it is its open development: since , it is relatively easy to expand the information to other cities in the world, making the project even more useful, if possible.

Other examples of maps that have dealt (although from other approaches) with the gender perspective are the (also made by geochicas), or the maps of feminist entities that exist in some cities or those that are collected in books such as by Joni Seager.

Unequal opportunities. From Myriad Edificions and Seager, J (2003. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World)

Another similar, yet different, project linked to maps and gender perspective is the initiative promoted by Esther Mingot (a well-known mapper within the community of OSM Spain under the pseudonym of [Lanxana] ( )) to , out of several open datasources from Barcelona City Council and Generalitat de Catalunya. As a result, OSM map will become more inclusive and useful for those collectives.

All those examples outline another important feature about maps: maps can also be social transformation tools! (and I love it!)

It is famous the example of the map that Dr. John Snow made in 1854 to understand the spread of cholera in London. That map allowed to deduce that cholera was infected by polluted water rather than by air, as was thought at that time (For more information on the map, please read [this text by John Mackenzie] ( ) in which he explains how the map works and how to reproduce it with current GIS tools). ↩︎
Geochicas is a group of OpenStreetMap women mappers aimed at closing the gender gap in that community. ↩︎