digital humanitarianism on openstreetmap
From October 2020 to June 2021, I conducted ethnographic research within the (humanitarian) OpenStreetMap universe, trying to understand how communities, crises, and corporations came together on OSM. My thesis was ultimately about how humanitarian technologies like open source maps are used and created in response to crisis, and the convoluted mix of humanitarian values, corporate interests, and international networks that intersect on the OpenStreetMap platform.
The project and community is incredibly complex, a confluence of humanitarian actors, technology workers, and crowdsourced labor. My initial questions focused on why people contribute to open-source platforms like OSM (and Wikipedia for that matter), but they later evolved into what role humanitarian mapping plays within the wider ecosystem of geospatial and mapping technologies it is a part of.
Increasingly, as this was just before the wave of new AI technologies, I found that OSM data was being used in order to train AI systems like those used for road detection, etc.
While the written work is in the process of publication (eventually!), there are a number of public videos that share some of my public-facing findings on the subject.
Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)
This talk shares my initial findings from this period, drawing from interviews and studies of political economy, science and technology studies, and humanitarianism. Social science methods might help us to better understand this changing period of OSM and HOT history, as it heads into the future.
Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain
This presentation focused on humanitarian mapping through qualitative study, and summarised the final findings from my MA. It aimed to scaffold a notion of the “open source mapping supply chain”, situating both humanitarian mapping and OpenStreetMap itself within a larger ecosystem of commercial, humanitarian, open source, government, and other actors in developing geospatial-related technologies.