[Talk-us] Gender in OpenStreetMap

[Marc Gemis]

In the old thread someone wrote (paraphrasing): I map from
photographs, so I'm not biased.

Since I map in the same way, I have a couple of thoughts. A photo is a
personal interpretation of the real world. The photographer framed the
scene, leaving out or including items. This can be conscious or
unconscious. The interpretation of the photo also depends on the
individual. I once send a photo to the osm-be mailing list and asked
people what they would map. My purpose was to see whether I missed
some things or perhaps teach people to see better and map things they
did not know you could map. Different mappers gave different answers.
This means to me that mapping from a photo is not necessarily
unbiased.

I'm not saying the person in the original thread is dishonest, I
really believe he is trying to do the best he can for OSM, but some
bias can occur.
I know I might never skip taking photos of wayside shrines or dog
parks, but I might "forget" to take a picture of a shop if I'm tired
or have taken lots of pictures during a walk.

What I am missing from all the statistics that we already have about
mappers today, is how divers we map. This can be done e.g. by counting
the number of different amenities, shops, crafts, leisures that a
mapper added and/or updated. So not counting the number of amenities
one maps, but the number of different values of amenity one mapped. Of
course this depends on how well mapped your area is or how many
different features there are in your area. But I'm not the one doing
the research.
Then one can try to see whether this "diversity number" is biased by
gender, religion, education, mother tongue or any other aspect.

E.g. I know nothing about trees, so I will not map the genus of the
trees. So what I know has an impact on OSM. Depending on the OSM
population, genus will be mapped or not. I do not know whether there
are a lot of people that know the difference between the different
species of trees in OSM. So I cannot tell whether OSM is a good,
reliable database to find out about trees in different regions. This
is just one example, please do not focus on this particular example in
your replies.

Those are interesting questions to me. I understand that others do not
care, but I hope people will allow researchers to investigate this
type of topics.

regards

m

p.s. I'm a Belgian, my first language is Dutch, so forgive me when I
didn't use the best English words. It is not my intent to insult or
shame anyone.

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 1:03 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Let's continue the conversation on this new thread, keeping in mind that we
> all need to keep our mind open and have productive and positive
> conversation.
>
> I reserve the right to add a moderated cooling off period if we get too
> hostile towards each other again.
>
> -Ian
>
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