Palen, Leysia, et al. “Success & Scale in a Data-Producing Organization: The Socio-Technical Evolution of OpenStreetMap in Response to Humanitarian Events.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015.
Discussion Leader: Ananya
Summary:
OpenStreetMap, often called ‘the Wikipedia of maps’, is a collaborative effort to create a common digital map of the world. This paper analyzes the socio-technical evolution of this large, distributed, volunteer-driven organization by examining its mapping activities during two major disaster events, Haiti earthquake in 2010 and 2013 Typhoon Yolanda.
The Haiti earthquake was the first major event that used OSM during its relief efforts. The repercussions of this sudden influx of usage hindered relief efforts, subsequently giving rise to multiple socio-technical changes within the organization.
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team(HOT) which assists humanitarian organizations with mapping needs was formalized and registered as a non-profit organization just 7 months later.
During Haiti earthquake, several issues such as mapping conflicts and map duplications arose. To address this congestion, HOT created the OSM Task Manager that helped mappers coordinate efficiently. The Administrator creates jobs for large geographical area and the Task Manager divides each job into one of the three types of tasks: ‘yellow’ (which means taken), ‘red’ (awaiting validation) and ‘green’ (completed).
Other changes included getting OSM licensed through ODBL – Open Database License. To attract and retain new participants, OSM upgraded its openstreetmap.org website and interface making it easier for new participants to map. ‘Notes’, a drop-pin annotation feature for users to point out improper tagging or suggest additional information, was also added.
Unlike Wikipedia which laid down governance policies and strategies as the community grew, the OSM governance structure still maintains a non-bureaucratic approach to promote and cope with growth. Furthermore to avert low diversity among contributors LearnOSM materials were translated into 9 languages.
Typhoon Yolanda, another disaster of the scale of Haiti earthquake that struck 4 years later tested OSM’s organizing efforts. The response to the event was significant with 3x increase in the number of contributors. The now well-established HOT coordinated with volunteers using emails, chatrooms. The Task Manager was widely used by the mappers which helped prevent mapping collisions.
However since all the jobs are put into only one instance of Task Manager, there is a possibility of sufficient traffic congestion as the mapping population grows. The OSM is considering multiple solutions to mitigate this problem. It has also developed a range of socio-technical interventions aimed at promoting a supportive environment towards new contributors while managing community growth. This is in stark contrast to Wikipedia’s policy driven strategies.
Reflection:
This paper presents a good description of how a community matured within the bounds of two major events that shaped the growth. I really appreciate how the authors tracked changes within the OSM community after the Haiti Earthquake and analyzed effects of those changes with regards to another major event (Typhoon Yolanda) 4 years later. One of the authors being a founding member of HOT definitely helped.
However I am skeptical about the comparisons made between Wikipedia and OSM’s way of operation because despite many commonalities, they still work with very distinct types of data. So a non-bureaucratic collaborative environments that OSM maintains may not work for Wikipedia which also has to deal with a completely different set of challenges associated with creative objects such as plagiarism, editorial disputes, etc.
One of the problems that the authors mention Wikipedia faces is with respect to diversity which the OSM community has made notable efforts to alleviate. Still, the gender disparity that plagued Wikipedia was prevalent in OpenStreetMap. Studies done in 2011 showed Wikipedia had 7% women contributor while in OSM it was worse, only 3%. I wish the authors had detailed more on the new email list that OSM launched in 2013 to promote inclusion of more women and how effective this step was to motivate a currently inactive group.
Although not extensively used, the Notes feature did show some potential use by both new and experienced users. However the authors conjectured that guests may use this for noting transient information such as ‘temporary disaster shelter’. I wonder why this is an issue. Incase of a disaster many important landmarks such as a makeshift emergency shelter or a food distribution center will be temporary and still be part of a relief team’s data needs. Well, an additional step must be developed to update the map when these temporary landmarks are gone.
Overall, this paper provides a good understanding of some of the features of OSM’s management technics and is also one of the first papers that studied OpenStreetMap with such intricacy.
Questions:
– Do you think the comparison made in the paper between Wikipedia and OSM about their governance strategy is fair? Will OSM’s collaborative governance style work for Wikipedia?
– How can gender imbalance or other diversity issues be resolved in a voluntary crowdsourcing environment?
– As the authors mention, guests can see Notes as an opportunity for personalization. How do you think OSM can reduce noise in notes? Can the Task Manager work here and label each note as a yellow, red or green task?
– I think a volunteer driven platform like OSM is particularly useful in a disaster situation when the landscape is changing rapidly. Do you feel the same? Can you think of any other volunteer driven application that will help in situational awareness at real time?
