OpenStreetMap |

Whose Knowledge Counts? Analysing Diversity and Exclusion in OpenStreetMap's Tagging Proposals Process

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:37:59 +0000

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

Collaborative Mapping: Maps for and by citizens

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 08:00:06 +0000

Last October 19th, I was representing , along with 4 other experiences, in the II Jornadas de Cartografías Colaborativas, organized by , where each one of us explained what we do to drive urban transformation processes through collaborative cartographies. In the session I explained what Collaborative Mapping is and what projects we do (with special emphasis on the Accessible Zaragoza project).

From the ’ blog (automated translation):

Next October 19 in the Albareda Cultural Center of Poble Sec, we will organize the II Conference of Collaborative Cartographies. In this second day we want to create a meeting space between different specialists, collectives and neighbors of the city to reflect on collaborative cartographies used in processes of urban transformation. In this case, unlike last year where there were experiences more focused on digital tools, we have invited examples with face-to-face methodologies that try to generate change or in communities.

This year we have invited five experiences:

Col-lectiu Punt 6 is a cooperative specialised in urbanism and architecture from a feminist perspective that uses collaborative mapping as a tool in various processes linked to the transformation of the city from a gender perspective. We have invited them to explain some mapping tools in terms of gender diagnosis.

Teixidora is a participative project to gather knowledge generated in talks and events, share documentation, explore connections, relate debates and activity to each other and map actors (in general in the techno-social field and the themes they intersect), emphasizing ethical and emancipatory perspectives, giving visibility to critical contributions. We have tested various tools and methodologies to document what is done and contextualize it.

Collaborative Mapping is defined as a space for the creation of collaborative maps at the service of citizens and as tools for decision making, sharing experiences and shaping the way in which we observe reality. For example, they have carried out a project to improve accessibility in the city of Zaragoza, combining face-to-face observations with online mapping tools.

Mapa Taula Urbanisme Veïnal de Barcelona. The TUVB will take advantage of this conference to present the online mapping tool for neighbourhood claims, which aims to serve as a platform for compiling all those urban conflicts and claims made in the city of Barcelona related to processes of urban transformation.

Living maps is a network of researchers, community activists, artists based in London that aims to promote the use of collaborative maps as tools for social change, encourage reflection and debate, public participation and creative forms of community action. In particular, they will present the Citizen Atlas of London, in which various collaborative mapping techniques were implemented with the aim of gathering the citizen’s vision to complement the drafting of the London 2050 Plan.

The day will be between 16.30 and 20.30 hours. We appreciate that if you are interested in participating in the day please register through the [following form] ( .

We wait for you!

Using OpenStreetMap with inclusive purposes: Accessible Zaragoza study case

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 08:00:06 +0000

SummerLab is a summer camp, a temporary cooperative meeting around topics related to various fields of technology, digital culture, open design and common learning, which brings together benchmark initiatives in these fields.

In its fourth edition, SummerLab proposes a programme that will tackle thematic meetings on data and citizen science during three moments of the summer with the participation of citizens, curious people, technological activists and people from the field of research. SummerLab is mainly a meeting space and its spirit is to share experiences and knowledge around diverse knowledge communities, which is why its operation as an intensive camp allows participants to cooperate, share and work together around the issues raised by the meeting or others linked to their interests or experiences.

In its first summer meeting SummerLab will work around data, citizen participation, privacy and transparency, analysing some of the perspectives that information and the massive treatment of data acquire in the present and doing so from different perspectives and spheres, such as academic, institutional or public-community. The meeting will combine two dynamics, an informative one that will translate into a public lecture with guests of reference projects in these fields and the other, practical or productive that will aim to produce some results through an intensive production workshop.

In its second meeting, in August, SummerLab will focus on astronomy, hosting the traditional annual meeting of citizen astronomy that will offer a series of workshops and observations of the firmament with the aim of bringing this science closer to citizens.

Finally, in September Summerlab 2019 will conclude with a meeting that will try to be a meeting point for citizen science in a broader sense with experiences that work in fields such as bio-hack labs, the environment, food or bioscience.

Source:

On sidewalks, crossings, kerbs, wheelchairs and cranes. #Zaccesibilidad: mapping for disabled people in Zaragoza

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 14:00:06 +0000

Within the Pint of Science 2019 event in Zaragoza, Miguel Sevilla-Callejo and myself explained what we are doing in Accessible Zaragoza, and action-research project by Universidad San Jorge and Collaborative Mapping, on urban mobility and disabilities.

Past, present and future of 'Zaragoza Accesible' study case

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 14:00:06 +0000

Today, cities face the greatest challenges in history due to their exponential growth, the concentration of more than half of the world’s population or the increase in wealth and social inequality, among other factors. Fortunately, it is becoming increasingly common to design, plan and manage cities taking into account aspects such as urban mobility, pollution reduction, energy efficiency, access to housing and social equality. This social awareness translates into more liveable, more efficient, fairer cities. However, this planning is usually designed on the basis of the anthropometric subject considered “normal”, paying little attention to functional diversity. Even though the number of people with some type of disability is increasing, their needs are often not taken into account, which makes it difficult or impossible for them to live autonomously and develop a full life.

Aware of this exclusion suffered by people with functional diversity, the research group OpenSource Architectures of the Universidad San Jorge organizes the first International Workshop on urban accessibility: “Inclusive Cities for All” that will take place on June 13 at the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Aragón. During that day, representatives of 10 universities from 5 different countries will present their research related to the same topic: the pursue of more inclusive cities that favour the integration of people with functional diversity. Convinced that research must have some return to society if it aims to improve people’s lives, the talks will be open and free for all who want to attend.

'Accessible Zaragoza' is now on TV

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

During the last few years, I have hardly shown any activity on this website. This is because they have coincided with periods of considerable intensity, especially in terms of work. I already wrote about , and today I would like to write about another other one: , the collaborative mapping project of aspects related to urban mobility and disability that I devised in the academic year 2015-16 within a chair at the Universidad San Jorge and in which I have been working as a principal investigator since then.

For some time I have been looking forward to share it here because it is a project in which I am putting a lot of enthusiasm and effort and which, on the other hand, is giving me many joys. One of them was the , but the most recent has been to have participated in the program of scientific dissemination of Aragón TV “ ”, which was broadcasted last Saturday, and in which I had the opportunity to participate and explain what the project¹ consists of.

You can see the (in Spanish, though). Starting at minute 12:55, I explain to the particle physicist Carlos Pobes the particularities of Accessible Zaragoza². Additionally, the program features Javier Monclús, researcher in architecture and urbanism at the University of Zaragoza, who opens the chapter by explaining the role that our cities play in our lives (which introduces our project very well); and Antonio Tausiet, who presents the project , a repository of surprising images of the city, both current and old. The rest of the footage is dedicated in the survey section to some of the myths about menstruation and to the invention of the chair folder.

Some images of the program, whose full content can be seen in

I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve participated in a TV show like this and it was a very enriching experience to record and prepare it. I was pleasantly surprised by the meticulous and respectful work made by , producers of “En ruta con la ciencia “. After the first contact, in which their staff gave me an operational overview of their program, I had a telephone interview that lasted for more than one hour with the documentary filmmaker Isabel (I don’t remember her last name). After having read all the documentation that I had previosuly facilitated to her, she asked me very specific questions and clarified doubts, making obvious that she had already carefully reviewed my matrials). At the same time, this work served to elaborate a script that they handed me in order to guide the interview that Carlos Pobes would make me a few days later. After the interview, part of the staff joined me on my workplace at San Jorge University, where we recorded more shots.

Honestly, I have to admit that I am very happy both with the experience of recording the program as with the final result, and I can do nothing but reiterate what I did on twitter and thank the entire team of [Sintregua] ( ), first, for giving us the opportunity to publicize our project and, second, for making a program so careful and with great respect for our work.

Muchas gracias por dedicarnos unos minutos a explicar el proyecto #zaccesible (https://t.co/ocrkHpUZ81) en un programa tan interesante como cuidado, y además, por hacerlo en gran compañía. cc/ @edmldmv @ArquitecturaUSJ @MapColabora
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

I would also like to thank all the people and entities that have participated in the project and, last, but not least, I would also like to emphasize that anyone willing to help us will be more than welcome.

Aprovecho también para dar las gracias a todas aquellas personas y entidades que han contribuido y siguen contribuyendo a hacer de #zaccesible una realidad: https://t.co/o7GtR9894W cc @DiscapacitadoSF @MapColabora @Hiri_Lagunkoiak @ganchillosocial #mundocrip ...
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

Y por supuesto, para recalcar que cualquiera puede formar parte del proyecto! Si quieres saber cómo ayudar en #zaccesible aquí te lo explicamos: https://t.co/aT2ZfJBmoh
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

Other no less important joys are the that I have had the opportunity to meet and work side by side with great people, such as the members of [Collaborative Mapping] ( ), which I founded almost unintentionally thanks to the then Director of Zaragoza Activa Las Armas José Ramon Insa and Miguel Sevilla-Callejo ([here I talked about it] ( , the people of [Disabled Without Borders Aragon] ( ) and [Mundo Crip] ( ) (I have yet to meet Marta Valencia, of the , who showed his interest in the project but we haven’t been able to match yet), as well as Mikel Gómez and the rest of the ’s staff and a lot of people from [OpenStreetMap] ( ) community. ↩︎
If the explanation of the program falls short you can always see the [specific website of the project] ( ), where you can find more information. ↩︎