{"id":2582,"date":"2016-08-17T18:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T22:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/?p=2582"},"modified":"2017-01-24T18:46:29","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T23:46:29","slug":"openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2016\/08\/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

“T<\/span>he OpenStreetMap Community <\/span>is at a crossroads, with some important choices on where it might choose to head next,” wrote Michal Migurski last month<\/a>. Identifying three types of map contributors\u2014robot mappers using third party data, crisis mappers responding to a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, and so-called “local craft mappers” (i.e., the original OSM userbase that edits the map at the community level, using GPS tracks and local knowledge),\u00a0Michal ruffled many feathers by saying that “[t]he first two represent an exciting future for OSM, while the third could doom it to irrelevance.” That’s largely because, in his view, the craft mappers’ passivity and complacency, and their entrenched position in the OSM hierarchy, are impeding the efforts of the\u00a0other two groups.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I heard much frustration from crisis mappers about the craft-style focus of the international State Of The Map conference in Brussels later this year, while the hostility of the public OSM-Talk mailing list to newcomers of any kind has been a running joke for a decade. The robot mappers show up for conferences but engage in a limited way dictated by the demands of their jobs. Craft mapping remains the heart of the project, potentially due to a passive Foundation board who\u2019ve let outdated behaviors go unexamined.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Naturally such pot-stirring did not go unnoticed (see the comments in Michal’s post).<\/p>\n

It’s probably not helpful to pit one group\u00a0of users against another. Each group is\u00a0contributing to the map for their own purposes (some of which, it must be said, are commercial and self-interested), but they all have the same\u00a0goal in mind: a good, usable map. It’s how they get there\u2014and why<\/em> they want to get there\u2014that’s at issue.<\/p>\n

Both craft and crisis mapping can fail to see the forest for the trees: both depend on the efforts of a motivated cadre of mappers, whether they’re local hobbyists trying to\u00a0improve the map of their own community, or mappers trying to help disaster relief efforts. But\u00a0relying on those efforts can lead to a map of wildly uneven quality. As I wrote in “All Online Maps Suck<\/a>,” my 2013 piece on online map quality,<\/p>\n

The problem with OSM is also its strength: it\u2019s entirely dependent on the attention of volunteers. Where there are a lot of volunteers, the map is invariably excellent. But where there aren\u2019t any volunteers, the map is empty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Automated edits<\/a> are the opposite of the above. When based on existing databases (CanVec<\/a> in Canada, TIGER<\/a> in the United States), they represent top-down mapping rather than\u00a0from the bottom up, which goes against the original sensibilities of OSM. But they can cover a lot of ground that would otherwise go unmapped, or mapped in only the most cursory way.<\/p>\n

The problem\u00a0is when the different\u00a0mapping methods\u00a0come into conflict. It’s extremely easy to step on one another’s toes. Local mapping efforts can be discouraged by\u00a0armchair mapping<\/a>\u00a0(which I have to confess I’ve done rather a lot of\u2014even crisis mapping can privilege foreign computer users over on-the-ground mapping) and automated edits that can overwrite individuals’ work if not handled carefully.<\/p>\n

Responding to Michal’s post<\/a>, Tom Lee identifies another constituency that Michal missed: “passive users of OpenStreetMap data.\u00a0Naturally I am thinking of Mapbox customers, but also people using MapQuest and Mapzen and Carto and Maps.me and countless other businesses.” Note the words\u00a0customers<\/em> and\u00a0businesses<\/em>\u2014not just map users.\u00a0Regardless of its original ethos, OSM data supports a lot of for-profit businesses. Tom puts his finger on it: there’s a dichotomy between mapping as a hobby and mapping as part of the job.<\/p>\n

For end users, the politics of OpenStreetMap ought to be\u00a0so much inside baseball. My own concern, as a heavy OSM contributor over the years (which is to say, a “local craft mapper”), has been\u00a0less about\u00a0how<\/em> the map was made than whether the end result was a good map. I worried a lot that my edits would get someone else into trouble, or that the incomplete map would be put to use\u2014by those “passive users” of OSM data\u2014before it was ready, for political or economic reasons. The voracious hunger for open mapping data was what worried me\u2014and it’s what’s driving the conflict in this case.<\/p>\n

(Comments are open, because I expect I’m wrong in some of the particulars.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The OpenStreetMap Community is at a crossroads, with some important choices on where it might choose to head next,” wrote Michal Migurski last month. Identifying three types of map contributors\u2014robot mappers using third party data,… More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"autoblue_enabled":true,"autoblue_custom_message":"","autoblue_shares":[],"autoblue_post_url":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,114],"tags":[386],"class_list":["post-2582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry","category-web-mapping","tag-openstreetmap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1789654,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2020\/11\/openstreetmaps-unholy-alliance\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":0},"title":"OpenStreetMap’s ‘Unholy Alliance’","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"22 November 2020","format":"link","excerpt":"OpenStreetMap, says Joe Morrison, \u201cis now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world\u2019s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written.\u201d Corporate teams, rather local mappers, are now responsible\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Industry"","block_context":{"text":"Industry","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/industry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1785131,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2018\/03\/openstreetmap-and-its-women-contributors\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":1},"title":"OpenStreetMap and Its Women Contributors","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"19 March 2018","format":"link","excerpt":"When I started contributing edits to OpenStreetMap in earnest, I couldn't help notice certain idiosyncrasies in its tagging: for example, there was a tag for brothels, which I didn't need to use, but there wasn't one for daycares, which in Quebec there are rather a lot of. That seemed odd.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Web Mapping"","block_context":{"text":"Web Mapping","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/web-mapping\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1787558,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2019\/08\/complaints-about-facebooks-automated-edits-in-thailand\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":2},"title":"Complaints about Facebook’s Automated Edits in Thailand","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"1 August 2019","format":"link","excerpt":"Facebook's AI tool has added some 480,000 kilometres of previously unmapped roads in Thailand to OpenStreetMap, BBC News reports, but some local mappers have been complaining about the quality of those edits, and the overwriting of existing edits by Facebook's editors: see OSM Forum threads here and here. In particular,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Industry"","block_context":{"text":"Industry","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/industry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1827506,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2024\/02\/vector-tiles-are-coming-to-openstreetmap\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":3},"title":"Vector Tiles Are Coming to OpenStreetMap","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"13 February 2024","format":"link","excerpt":"On the OpenStreetMap blog, an announcement that vector tiles will be coming to OSM later this year. This is a significant, if belated technical change: other map platforms moved to vector mapping years ago (Google announced the change in 2013). But there are reasons for the delay: Vector tiles have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Web Mapping"","block_context":{"text":"Web Mapping","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/web-mapping\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3007,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2016\/10\/hurricane-matthew-map-roundup\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":4},"title":"Hurricane Matthew Map Roundup","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"6 October 2016","format":"link","excerpt":"Start with the National Hurricane Center, which has lots of different maps of Hurricane Matthew's\u00a0predicted path, weather warnings, rainfall potential and so forth.\u00a0See also maps from Weather Underground. Google's Crisis Map includes evacuation resources\u2014Red Cross shelters, evacuation routes, traffic data\u2014in addition to storm track and precipitation information. Matthew has already\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Weather and Climate"","block_context":{"text":"Weather and Climate","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/weather-and-climate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"nhc-matthew","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.maproomblog.com\/xq\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/nhc-matthew-1.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.maproomblog.com\/xq\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/nhc-matthew-1.gif?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.maproomblog.com\/xq\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/nhc-matthew-1.gif?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.maproomblog.com\/xq\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/nhc-matthew-1.gif?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1790245,"url":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/2021\/02\/100-million-edits-to-openstreetmap\/","url_meta":{"origin":2582,"position":5},"title":"100 Million Edits to OpenStreetMap","author":"Jonathan Crowe","date":"25 February 2021","format":"link","excerpt":"The 100 millionth edit to OpenStreetMap was uploaded today, the OpenStreetMap Blog reports. \u201cThis milestone represents the collective contribution of nearly 1 billion features globally in the past 16+ years, by a diverse community of over 1.5 million mappers.\u201d","rel":"","context":"In "Web Mapping"","block_context":{"text":"Web Mapping","link":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/category\/web-mapping\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2582"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2654,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582\/revisions\/2654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maproomblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}