[OSM-Science] looking for pointers to surveys of OSM members

Levente Juhász jlevente89 at gmail.com
Wed May 22 15:35:15 UTC 2019


Hi Abishek,

I just noticed this thread, sorry for the late reply. Hopefully you still
find my response useful. There has been some work done on this. I'm cherry
picking a few below:

- One of my earlier studies might be useful where I look at a data import
and investigate the activity of different user groups with different
motivation:
Juhász, L., & Hochmair, H. (2018). OSM Data Import as an Outreach Tool to
Trigger Community Growth? A Case Study in Miami. *ISPRS International
Journal of Geo-Information*, *7*(3), 113.

- One classic and highly cited study that describes motivations in VGI
projects:
Coleman, D., Georgiadou, Y., & Labonte, J. (2009). Volunteered geographic
information: The nature and motivation of produsers. *IJSDIR*, *4*(1),
332-358.

- Another classic specifically about OSM:
Budhathoki, N. R., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2013). Motivation for open
collaboration: Crowd and community models and the case of
OpenStreetMap. *American
Behavioral Scientist*, *57*(5), 548-575.

- And of course, the 2014 review paper by Neis & Zielstra has a lot of good
information on this. Check out section 3.2.3. Motivation, Behavior and
Gender Dimensions that lists a couple surveys. I personally think that this
contribution is very important because research quite often refers to
OSMers as "non-experts", however, many of the mappers have background in
geography, cartography, gematics, GIS, etc. There's some proof in this
review.
Neis, P., & Zielstra, D. (2014). Recent developments and future trends in
volunteered geographic information research: The case of OpenStreetMap. *Future
internet*, *6*(1), 76-106.

These are just the first few papers that came to my mind. GIScience and VGI
research specifically has done quite a lot of work on this topic.

Cheers,
Levente

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 3:26 PM Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>
wrote:

> You might be able to gather some preliminary information on motivation by
> reviewing Belgium's Mapper of the Month [1] articles. From the articles you
> should be able to get some broad categories for use in your survey. I found
> it very helpful when researching for a talk I gave a while back.
>
> I do send a welcome message, as does the Belgium community, to each new
> user in Washington State. I would be happy to include a link to your
> survey. So far this year I've gotten 229 new users. Not all get a message.
> For example I quite sending to an infamous SEO that uses unique user names
> on each edit. And they never reply. Of those messages I send only a small
> handful reply. I suspect you'd get similar results.
>
> [1] https://openstreetmap.be/en/projects/motm.html
>
> Best,
> Clifford
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 10:59 AM Abhishek Nagaraj <
> abhishek.nagaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Could someone help me figure out what is out there in terms of surveys of
>> OSM contributors? I'm looking for two types of data -- (a) demographics /
>> background of contributors and (b)"qualitative" motivations for why someone
>> contributes.
>>
>> Any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks!
>>
>> --
>> Abhishek Nagaraj
>> Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley Haas
>> web: http://www.abhishekn.com
>> cell: +1 617-401-1662
>> _______________________________________________
>> Science mailing list
>> Science at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/science
>>
>
>
> --
> @osm_washington
> www.snowandsnow.us
> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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