[OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

Mon Jun 15 02:11:43 UTC 2015

Hi All,

First off, let me say that I’ve really enjoyed this discussion. I admire the mixture of passion and overall civility on a really difficult topic. I’ve honestly learned some things reading all your replies.

I have a lot of thoughts about remote mapping vs. on the ground mapping but don’t have good words to pull them all together, so I won’t try here. I actually wanted to talk about Missing Maps, since I helped set it up at the Red Cross and think Erica’s article misunderstands it a little.

Missing Maps is meant to be a union of remote mapping and local mapping. 50/50, even split, each with a role to play in the overall “project”. We put a lot of effort into involving, supporting and where necessary creating local mapping communities in the developing world to do the on-the-ground side of Missing Maps work. If you want to know more about that check out the video from Drishtie Patel’s presentation at State of the Map US. She tells that story better than I can here. 

Remote mapping was easier to set up in the early phases of the project and much more accessible to the Western “core” of OSM contributors, not to mention sympathetic journalists, who wanted to check out and perhaps contribute to the project. As a result the remote component has gotten an outsized amount of attention within the greater OSM community even though it’s only half of the story. 

Regarding the charges of using the map for disaster and development purposes instead of being driven by “purer” entirely local mapping objectives: guilty as charged (sort of). The Red Cross ([1]) has some long standing mechanisms to make sure the work we do responds to genuine community concerns ([2]). We try hard to be sincere about that and incorporate our newer, relatively flashier OSM work into those longstanding mechanisms. We also make sure that wherever possible, the Red Cross volunteers working on Missing Maps projects come from the communities we’re mapping themselves. But it’s true that we focus on humanitarian and development objectives, because well, we’re the Red Cross and that’s our mission.

Missing Maps was set up by genuine OSM lovers who wanted to link their passion for humanitarian work with their passion for OSM. We’ve pushed the Red Cross really hard not just to use OSM data but contribute back and be responsible members of the OSM community. But we’re never going to escape our humanitarian / development focus because of who we are and we have to accept that.

Transitioning this a little, let me say this about local vs. remote mapping:

I strongly feel that if we want to encourage local mapping in the “purest” sense then we need to do more than wring our hands about remote mapping and imports, put local communities on pedestals and hope for the best. I think the OpenStreetMap Foundation needs to step up, organize itself and find ways to make it easier to be an OSM enthusiast throughout the world. That means helping to fund State of the Maps and scholarships to attend, holding workshops, building (much) easier to use tools, and scaling its infrastructure to handle the next 10 million contributors. People should join OSM because they want to and are passionate about it, not because some Westerners came and told them it’s important — but we can do a lot more to make those passions possible. The “deliberately weak” OSMF model does no favors to the growth of local OSM communities, especially in parts of the world where organizing communities is a pretty tough task to begin with.

HOT does a lot of these things but it was set up with humanitarian objectives and has to be true to those. HOT shouldn’t be the “OSM outside of the West” institution and it’s bad for HOT and OSM both to treat it as such.

Thanks for all the brilliant thoughts so far. Looking forward to the brilliant replies.

- Robert

[1] Doctors Without Borders / Medicines Sans Frontieres works significantly differently and I won’t pretend to speak for them.

[2] Among others: http://www.ifrc.org/vca

—
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On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 7:34 PM, moltonel 3x Combo <moltonel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 13 June 2015 15:37:22 GMT+01:00, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>>http://groundtruth.in/2015/06/05/osm-mapping-power-to-the-people/
> I really liked that article, but to me it doesn't argues *against
> remote mapping* as much as it argues *for local mapping*.
> I think everybody already agreed that local trumps remote, and the
> article is enlightening about how important that is and even how to
> define "local". But that doesn't mean that remote mapping is a bad
> thing. To me, remote and local are two necessary tools in the box. OSM
> wouldn't be hafl as good as it is today without that combinaison of
> multiple mapper profiles who contribute to a given area.
> If remote mapping slows local community growth (I have my doubts), or
> if a New Yorker newbie makes a mess of african highway classification,
> the way to treat this is to get more contributors, locals spread
> everywhere, real strong diversity, better tools and documentation.
> etc. The "solution" of holding off remote editing, letting the map
> linger in a not-very-usable state for a potentially very long time,
> does not sound very sensible to me.
>> frederik at remote.org
> Starting a thread arguing against remote mapping from an "@remote.org"
> email address ? Love it :p
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