Geochicas |

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.

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.

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