[Osmf-talk] Paid Mapping / WikiPR like issues in OSM?

Jonathan bigfatfrog67 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 29 00:37:52 UTC 2013


You are right there is that risk, just like any open source community 
fears someone getting inside our open doors and then running amok.  
However, when that happens, and it surely will, we will tidy up the 
mess, analyse if it it could have been prevented and then move on, but 
we will continue to leave the doors wide open because it is by leaving 
those doors open, no matter what, that defines all open source 
communities and what accrues all the benefits.

On the subject of what responsibility the agent company has for its 
employees' edits, I would refer you to the rights anyone has in a civil 
court, all very pretty but pretty unattainable!

Jonathan

http://bigfatfrog67.me

On 28/11/2013 23:59, Serge Wroclawski wrote:
> Jonathan,
>
> I think you've touched upon the key issue here, which isn't paid vs
> non-paid, it's a question of motivation and incentive. and how this
> interacts with the issue of agency.
>
> Imagine I had a contest and said "Whoever maps the most supermarkets
> wins $1000. There would be motivation to go out and find supermarkets.
> But there would also be motivation to copy other maps, or possibly
> invent supermarkets out of whole cloth.
>
> Now what if instead of a contest, these were paid employees? This
> changes the equation because now we are talking about the issue of
> "agency". If an employee does something wrong on the job, you do not go
> after the employee individually, you go after the company. And the
> company cannot say that they are not responsible for the actions of a
> single employee, because that employee was acting as an agent of the
> company.
>
> So how does this intersect OSM?
>
> Luckily, it hasn't so far AFAIK, but imagine if we had an interested
> party who wanted to add features to OSM such as the example of the
> supermarkets. They tell their employees "Go map supermarkets" and the
> employees each do so, under their own accounts. So we have users A, B, C,
> and D all mapping supermarkets. User A goes out and maps real
> supermarkets that they've surveyed themselves. Users B, C, on the other
> hand, copy supermarkets from other maps, maybe one of them uses Google
> and the other uses Here Maps. And user D doesn't bother copying, they
> just make up supermarkets. And so all over the world, we have
> supermarkets being mapped, maybe for months.
>
> No one really notices a few "wrong" supermarkets until one day then we
> see that user D's contributions are untrue.
>
> So we now have to go through the process of reverting D's contributions,
> maybe blocking D's account (because D continues to have an incentive to
> map!), etc.
>
> We may never even notice B, C's contributions are copies until much
> later, but such edits, whether they're copied or made up are bad.
>
> Now imagine there is employee E. E does something even more interesting.
> E is a clever programmer and screen scrapes supermarket locations from
> websites, then geocodes them from Nominatim into OSM. The problem is
> that these locations from Nominatim are just estimates (as they are
> for many places)
>
> In all of the cases, we have bad edits, with harm to the community
> because the community has to clean up the mess. Cleaning the mess has a
> cost- it takes time for users to revert changesets, to do the
> investigations, etc.
>
> If it's a single vandal user, we take these problems as rogue "bad
> actors", but if it turned out that all these editors were acting on
> behalf of a company, the question in my mind is "What responsibility
> does the company have to the OSM community for the actions of its
> employees?"
>
> This hasn't happened yet- thankfully, and I hope it never does, but I
> think Frederik brings up a really interesting question and it's
> certainly one worth thinking about.
>
> - Serge





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