[Talk-GB] Open survey on participation biases in OSM

[Paul]

Dear Zoe, all

I clicked yes to allow research on my edits.

I think this is a bit of an advance on the previous research, which seemed 
to rely on wiki pages, edits and discussion. 

My impression of the UK community is that they tend not to use the wiki as 
a source of guidance or rulings of any sort. This may be based on arrogance 
as the originators of the project, but it seems to me that the wiki has a 
rather German feel to it, as do some of the presets - it's best to 
interpret Craft as being the German version rather than the English one for 
example - rather more expansive and including a lot of mittelstand 
manufacturing.

It's quite possible that the quarterly projects counteract earlier biases. 
Because ther itch that got me into OSM in the first place was due to OS 
licensing stopping me putting base maps under my mapping of poverty issues, 
I've always been interested in mapping correlates of poverty. So, finding 
that postboxes are much more common in social housing areas than in private 
housing estates is interesting. 

Mapping childcare is also interesting to me, but difficult. The difficulty 
resides in the fact that childminders operating in their own home may not 
advertise, and so there is no surveyable sigh of a childcare premise. As I 
only use armchair sources to add value and check surveys, I'm not going to 
rely on a list of childminders when the house contains to sign that the 
list is right. The same applies to after school clubs. These are almost 
never advertised, while nurseries and pre-schools are. Social care for 
elderly people is usually advertised, but social care for children and 
various other groups is not. The food hygiene data may contain listings for 
these, which in some cases are suppressed (childrens homes, womens' 
refuges) for obvious reasons, or in other cases are not verifiable by any 
sign on the premises.

Mapping the FHRS data also enables pointing out some issues with other 
research. There's been widely promoted research showing that fast food 
outlets are more common in more deprived areas. Having mapped a selection 
of less and more deprived areas, I have a fairly strong supposition that 
the categorisation of food outlets differs systematically, with those in 
deprived areas having a higher chance of FHRS categorisation of 
Takeaway/sandwich shop, while in richer areas there is a greater chance of 
categorisation as Restaurant/cafe/canteen. Where delivery is by Deliveroo 
etc, the only practical difference is the existence of a sit-down option.

Paul Bivand

On Monday, 4 September 2017 11:38:48 BST, Zoe Gardner wrote:
>
>
> Dear OSM talk-gb subscriber
>
>  
>
> I am a Research Fellow in the Nottingham Geospatial Institute 
> at the University of Nottingham, interested in participation 
> biases in geospatial crowdsourced projects such as OSM and other 
> Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects. My current 
> research project is concerned with the way in which 
> participation biases in OSM may potentially affect the usability 
> of the data that is collected and subsequently what is available 
> to location based service providers which use OSM as their 
> primary geospatial database.
>
> The project is motivated by recent research that has found a 
> strong male bias in OSM participation. This has led to 
> assertions that various geospatial knowledge could be under 
> represented or poorly recorded on the map. However, the actual 
> consequences of this bias remain little explored or reported. By 
> collecting information about contributors to OSM, which can then 
> be analyzed along with their editing patterns, the impacts of 
> this bias might begin to be measured and therefore better 
> understood. I have therefore published an online survey designed 
> to collect information directly from OSM editors and I would 
> like to invite as many of you as possible to participate. The 
> survey is anonymous and takes a couple of minutes to complete.
>
> If you are an OSM contributor and are interested in or would 
> like to participate in the study, please click on the link 
> below, which will take you to the Bristol Online Survey website 
> where you will find more information and an opportunity to 
> participate in the survey. As a small incentive, at the close of 
> the survey in a few weeks’ time, 60 respondents will be drawn at 
> random to receive a £15 Amazon voucher.
>
>  
>
> To participate in the survey, click on the link below:
>
>  
>
> https://nottingham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/osm-user-profiles
>
>  
>
> Please do think about participating. It is hoped that knowledge 
> about the way participation biases impact on crowdsourced maps 
> will enable new strategies to be developed to address any 
> resulting voids in the geospatial information provided by 
> amateur mappers. In turn this could strengthen the role played 
> by platforms such as OSM in urban planning and sustainability 
> and raise the profile of the important mapping work that you all 
> do.
>
>  
>
> In the meantime, if you would like to know more about me, my 
> research activities or the project, please visit my University 
> webpage (link below) and do not hesitate to get in touch 
> directly or via the OSM messaging service.
>
>  
>
> https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/engineering/people/zoe.gardner
>
>  
>
> Thank you
>
> Zoe
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
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