[OSM-talk] Analysing the OSM community

[Maurizio Napolitano]

I found today this article

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making
Author: Yu-Wei Lina

Abstract
Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper
provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led,
user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs
Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to
illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap
making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively
and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are
situated in different places around the world but engaged with the
same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate
that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables
actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through
interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping,
the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that
unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and
offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap
is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views.
The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an
OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have.
Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand
mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social
repertoires.



http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a935694438~frm=titlelink