[OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[Tom Lee]

These critiques seem to be beginning to develop themes explored more fully
and famously by James Scott in _Seeing Like A State_. In it, he explores
the implications of government efforts at systematization, including the
original French cadastre and some German forest management projects.

I'm afraid the news is worse than you might think, Frederik: Scott makes a
compelling case that the *very act of mapping itself* snuffs out locally
adapted systems of property management, social support and cultural
exchange. It is a troubling critique and one that bears serious
consideration. (It also carries vast and unwieldy intellectual coattails,
including a deep connection to the failed anarchist project of the early
twentieth century.)

For my part, the value of being able to deliver emergency services,
economic development and competent governance seem overwhelmingly worth the
cultural costs that accompany efforts to rationalize the world. It seems to
me that the verdict is in and we're all building a global society (and
global map!). I'm skeptical that OSM should or can be a meaningful bulwark
against this process.

Local mapping is preferable not because it escapes the intellectual
hegemony of mapping practices -- there is no escape from them at all if you
are making a unified map -- but because it delivers a better map.

And some map is better than no map:

> Does every building address need to be mapped? If not, it just seems like
an easy win — why not collect everything? One reason not to is because
later when you find you need local buy-in, even OSM may be viewed as an
outsider project meant to dominate a neighborhood, a city, especially in
sensitive neighborhoods where this has indeed been a primary use of maps. I
wonder if people will one day want to create “our map” separately from OSM.
A different global map wiki which is geared toward self-determination,
perhaps? That would be a major loss for the OSM community.

This struck me as shortsighted.  The author is suggesting that leaving the
map blank is preferable because someone might fill it in later, and that
person might feel intimidated by the presence of existing data. I will
gently submit that needing a blank slate is not even close to the most
off-putting thing about OSM for new mappers.

More to the point, even if you take an *extremely* rosy view of the extent
to which the act of mapping enhances self-determination, the "loss to the
OSM community" seems vastly less important than the losses to everyone who
could be using the map to facilitate their businesses, recreation, or
government. Every day that a part of the map remains unusably empty is a
day that those people lose benefits they might have had -- or a day in
which they become more reliant on closed data that has already gotten the
job done.

Tom
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