Robert Soden

From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community Mapping: The Post-earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti

The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 catalyzed a nascent set of efforts in then-emergent “volunteer technology communities.” Among these was the response from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-driven project that makes geospatial data free and openly available. Following the earthquake, remotely located volunteers rapidly mapped the affected areas to support the aid effort in a remarkable display of crowdsourced work. However, some within that effort believed that the impact and import of open and collaborative mapping techniques could provide much richer value to humanitarian aid work and the long-term development needs of the country. They launched an ambitious project that trialed methods for how to create sustainable and locally-owned community-mapping ecosystems in at-risk regions of the world. This paper describes how an organization that emerged out of the response—the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team—formalized their practices in relation to many different stakeholder needs with the aim for setting a model for how the potential of participatory, community mapping could be realized in Haiti and beyond.

Success & Scale in a Data-Producing Organization: The Socio-Technical Evolution of OpenStreetMap in Response to Humanitarian Events

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, through quantitative and qualitative examination of the OSM database and other sites of articulation work, examines organizational growth through the lens of two catastrophes that spurred enormous humanitarian relief responses-the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. The temporally- and geographically- constrained events scope analysis for what is a rapidly maturing, whole-planet operation. The first disaster identified how OSM could support other organizations responding to the event. However, to achieve this, OSM has had to refine mechanisms of collaboration around map creation, which were tested again in Typhoon Yolanda. The transformation of work between these two events yields insights into the organizational development of large, data-producing online organizations.

Finding the Way to OSM Mapping Practices: Bounding Large Crisis Datasets for Qualitative Investigation

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and interactions of volunteer mappers operating in the high-tempo, high-volume context of disasters. To do this, we built upon and expanded prior network analysis techniques to select high-value portions of the vast OSM data for further qualitative analysis. We then performed detailed content analysis of the identified activity and, where possible, conducted interviews with the participants. This research allowed the identification of seven distinct mapping practices that can be classified according to dimensions of time, space, and interpersonal interaction. Our work represents a baseline for future research about how OSM crisis mapping practices have evolved over time.

Infrastructure in the Wild: What Mapping in Post-Earthquake Nepal Reveals about Infrastructural Emergence

Disasters and their impacts have unavoidable spatial characteristics. As such, maps are necessary and omnipresent features of the information landscapes that surround and support disaster response. Professional and volunteer GIS services are increasingly in demand to support map-based information visualization during crises. This paper investigates the work of mapmakers working on the response to the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. In comparison to prior events, we found significantly more collaboration and spatial data sharing took place between map producers working across humanitarian organizations and parts of the Nepal government. Collaboration between mapping practitioners was supported by a complex and emergent information infrastructure composed of social and technical elements, some of which were brought through experience with prior disaster events, and some which were shaped anew by the availability and acceptance of open data sources. Our research investigates these elements of the spatial information infrastructure in post-earthquake Nepal to consider infrastructural emergence.

EPIC-OSM: A Software Framework for OpenStreetMap Data Analytics

An important area of work in big data software engineering involves the design and development of software frameworks for data-intensive systems that perform large-scale data collection and analysis. We report on our work to design and develop a software framework for analyzing the collaborative editing behavior of OpenStreetMap users when working on the task of crisis mapping. Crisis mapping occurs after a disaster or humanitarian crisis and involves the coordination of a distributed set of users who collaboratively work to improve the quality of the map for the impacted area in support of emergency response efforts. Our paper presents the challenges related to the analysis of OpenStreetMap and how our software framework tackles those challenges to enable the efficient processing of gigabytes of OpenStreetMap data. Our framework has already been deployed to analyze crisis mapping efforts in 2015 and has an active development community.

Thin Grey Lines: Confrontations With Risk on Colorado's Front Range

This paper reports on two years of ethnographic observation of the science and politics of flood risk in Colorado, as well as design research that examines citizen interaction with expert knowledge about flooding in the region. We argue that the 100-year floodplain standard that inform maps produced by the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)s National Floodplain Insurance Program (NFIP) represent a problematic form of discursive closure of scientific understanding of flood hazard. We show that in order to meet the requirements of the NFIP, this standard acts as a closure that conveys a certainty that the underlying science does not warrant and foreshortens dialogue on disaster risk and public understanding of flood hazard. Engaging with literature in science and technology studies and human-centered computing, we investigate design opportunities for resisting closure and supporting public formation through encounters with the uncertainty and complexities of risk information.

Crisis Informatics in the Anthropocene: Disasters as Matters of Care and Concern

My research examines new ways of approaching the contentious and uncertain knowledge politics surrounding natural disasters and climate change. Using three case studies, focused on different locations and type of hazards, I show how current information systems and technologies reproduce and reinforce long-standing discourses that have been widely shown to be problematic by social science research on disaster. Adopting the approach of research through design (RtD), I explore approaches to understanding flood risk, earthquake damage, and sea-level rise that seek to undermine these discourses and provide new ways of engaging with they challenges they present.

Crisis Informatics for Everyday Analysts: A Design Fiction Approach to Social Media Best Practices

The importance of social media usage during crisis has been well established in academic and practitioner communities. Yet, the promise of rendering insights from social media for responders in a consistent and reliable manner remains a challenge and accepted standards of practice have yet to emerge. Inspired by a May 2017 workshop consisting of 15 Crisis Informatics practitioners from 3 continents, we imagine a training curriculum aimed at developing the necessary skills to harness social media data during a crisis. We call the recipients of that training Crisis Informatics Research Technicians (CIRT). We offer this design fiction to stimulate a conversation among Crisis Informatics scholars, Human-Computer Interaction scholars, crisis response professionals, and the public on best practices, tools, limitations, and ethics of using social media to improve crisis response.

The Crowd is the Territory: Assessing Quality in Peer-Produced Spatial Data During Disasters

ABSTRACT Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect of data quality, a relative concept requiring standards to measure against. The field of Geographic Information Sciences has developed standards for this comparison, achieving widespread acceptance. However, the peer production model of spatial data presents new opportunities—and challenges—to traditional methods of quality assessment. Through analysis of the OpenStreetMap database, we show that temporal editing patterns and contributor characteristics can provide additional means of understanding spatial data quality. Drawing upon experiences from Wikipedia, we offer and evaluate three intrinsic quality metrics of peer-produced spatial data to assess the quality of contributions to OpenStreetMap for crisis response.