[OSM-Science] The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 04 February 2021, Benjamin Herfort wrote:
>
> today I wanted to share with you some very recent research findings
> that we've just published in the journal "Scientific Reports" and by
> doing this re-activate this mailing list. The title of the article is
> "The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap
> Community" and I can ensure you that we tried really hard to provide
> a
> comprehensive and detailed picture on what the humanitarian OSM
> community has been working on for the past decade.
> [...]

Thanks for making this available with open access.

You seem to be looking exclusively at mapping activities happening under 
the umbrella of HOT and their direct cooperation partners.  That 
certainly has value as research regarding the history of the activity 
of this organizational complex but says very little about the history 
of "humanitarian mapping in OSM" in general.  Depending on your 
definition of humanitarian mapping (the paper is not quite clear about 
that - the only definition you hint at that does not essentially cover 
all mapping in OSM or organized mapping in general is remote mapping 
without personal local knowledge of the mapper) what you look at could 
very well only cover around 20-50 percent of humanitarian mapping in 
OSM (and that would clearly not be a representative subset).

What i am missing in the specific analysis of the data is a look at 
potential non-local factors that influence the regional distribution of 
HOT tasking manager based mapping activities.  When looking at the 
distribution of those it seems fairly clear that there are other 
factors of influence than population density, HDI or other local 
characteristics.  What fairly likely also plays a large role is 
external, relational factors - like for example cultural and economic 
connections between the countries from which mapping is organized and 
performed and the countries which are mapped.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/