2023-07-11 23:00:00 +0000

openstreetmap reflections so far

I recently joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in modering their Community Working Group and Tech Working Group’s discussions on AI-Assisted Mapping.

This, in part, was a reminder that I (still!) haven’t published an OSM diary that summarises my MA research, and that publication is still process. But it was also a reminder that I have yet to really summarise or bring together what I have shared so far.

Here’s a short summary:

Moderation: “Perspectives on AI-Assisted Mapping”

These two sessions - recorded as hour-long discussions with unrecorded 30 minute discussions at the end, were really interesting (and much-needed!) community spaces for the OSM community. I’m grateful to have been given the trust needed to facilitate, and learned a lot from folks there. Most notably, I think the discussion primarily ended up focusing not on “what we should be building” but what AI means to mappers in the first place (these being very different things)!

Talk: “Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)”

This was given at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in 2021 in the form of a talk. It shared some of my initial thoughts around crisis mapping specifically, and citations in that direction. In particular, I focused a bit more on what defines the kinds of crises that become maps, and informational asymmetries within the community.

Talk: “Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain”

This talk was given at the State of the Map conference (the global summit for the OSM community) in 2022 in the science/research track. I shared a summary of my MA research, with many more ethnographic excerpts than I was able to bring to the previous iteration. In this talk, I focused primarily on asking the kinds of questions that emerged from my conversations, discussions, and observations over the last ~2 years. Folks’ reactions were so kind!

Thank yous