Hi, I'm known for being critical of armchair mapping by people with no personal connection tho the area being mapped. Whether done for fun, for money, or to help, I think that in most cases it is a bad idea that runs against the spirit of OSM.
(I'm willing to concede that there are exceptions, and that sometimes doing something that's against the spirit may still be useful. But these are individual cases, to be carefully justified, and remote mapping should never become anyone's standard mode of contribution.) Until now I thought that the main exception, one that even I would have to accept, is mapping for humanitarian purposes. I was all the more surprised - positively surprised - to read this thoughtful essay by Erica Hagen, who founded Map Kibera: http://groundtruth.in/2015/06/05/osm-mapping-power-to-the-people/ I'd encourage everyone to read that. It questions some rarely questioned assumptions; it even says that mapping by locals doesn't really "count" if those locals are just doing it for the money (a sentiment that I've always felt but rarely dared to express, because who can expect locals in the poorest parts of the world to map "for fun" like privileged westerners do?). It also says that "local" isn't "local" if the locals from the wealthy city map the slum in their midst. I've tended to routinely associate the call for "more diversity" in OSM as mainly being one for levelling the gender playing field but this article goes much further. In some parts the article echoes a rather more acerbic posting written last month by Gwilym Eades, a university lecturer in London: http://place-memes.blogspot.de/2015/05/the-hubris-of-proactive-disaster-mapping.html which essentially accused humanitarian mapping (and as I would add, any remote mapping really) of "homogenising, westernising, and colonising" the map. I don't agree with everything written in these postings but they certainly deserve some wider audience, and that's why I am writing this here - since neither author is on these lists and I haven't seen their messages mentioned or quoted anywhere. I think the tl;dr of both these postings could be: "Whenever you give someone a map by remote mapping, you also take something away from them." Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
