[OSM-talk] OSM and Academia (was: Survey about Incentives to contribute to OSM)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/14/2012 07:25 PM, Simone Cortesi wrote:
> Good points Richard,

I don't exactly share Richard Weait's criticism. I dislike surveys that 
ask me all sorts of personal information before even getting to the 
point, but I don't smell any malice.

> in addition to this: I've been part of this community for a while (7
> years) and never heard about this people pretending to be from the
> university of Münster, Germany.

This, sadly, is a general trend in the acamdemic community. Many of them 
seem to believe that it is unfitting to become too involved with the 
object of study; that you can either be a good community member or write 
study OSM but not both. This leads to a lot of papers being written by 
people who have never set foot in a forum or mailing list, often haven't 
even mapped or been to a pub meet.

If I were a professor I wouldn't allow a student to write anything about 
OSM without acquiring first-hand knowledge. And that would mean that by 
the time the guy starts doing his thesis, we (or at least the local OSM 
community) already know him.

There was an excellent presentation on this issue by Muki Haklay at 
SOTM-EU (http://sotm-eu.org/talk?41 and use the little icons next to the 
speaker photo to access slides or a video). He formulated a "code of 
engagement" for scientists dealing with OSM, which suggested the 
following rules:

1. Even if you are just going to use the data, do some mapping, and 
understand the process. Join a mapping party.

2. Read - Books, Wiki, Blog, and mailing lists.

3. Explore the data. (Then talk with someone in the community to make 
sure you've got it right.)

4. Open Access. Put outputs in Open Access repositories, publish in Open 
Access journals.

5. Open Knowledge. Publish and share the data that you've processed, and 
ideally the code.

6. Be a "critical friend": You have a responsibility to your academic 
field, and the OSM community can deal with criticism.

7. Teach.

The talk is worth reading/viewing. Even today, too little comes back to 
OSM from academia. There are notable exceptions (most of our hosting is 
actually paid for by universities) but very few people in academia 
actually honour Muki's "rules". Every year we have new OSM quality 
assessments but almost nobody shares their code so that it could be run 
continuously instead of being done in a "snapshot" fashion. Every year 
some university announces some cool new web site or mobile application 
but most of that is closed source.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"