Can digital goods be neutral? Evaluating OpenStreetMap’s equity through participatory data visualisation
Using a transformative and empowering participatory process with Geochicas, a collective of women and LGBT+ mappers, to evaluate and surface how minoritised demographics are involved, recognised, or excluded from data production and decision-making in OSM.
Digital goods have typically been framed as mere technological artefacts, by consciously putting aside any human consideration to pursue a neutral approach. Conversely, neutrality has been portrayed as a positive aspiration that prevents any form of bias that could pervert the fulfilment of the digital goods’ mission.
The project contends that, as well-intentioned as this aspiration may be, this apparently neutral standpoint that ignores how these goods are governed, may be inadvertently producing and reproducing new types of oppression and colonialism. This is especially critical in projects whose communities are extremely biased towards specific and hegemonic demographics.
This transformative research promotes digital equity by empowering members from under-represented communities to co-produce data visualisations and tools that examine and challenge the impact of neutrality as a guiding principle in a particular and relevant case of digital good: OpenStreetMap [OSM].
The project will implement a transformative participatory process with Geochicas, a collective of feminist women who map, to evaluate and surface how minoritised demographics are involved, recognised, or excluded from data production and decision-making in OSM while empowering its participants. This will be achieved in two stages.
First, the identification of “gender controversies” in OSM, this is, specific examples of existing or missing map features and the decisions leading to that which are problematic from a gendered lens. Second, by combining lived experiences with expertise in data visualisation to co-design a tool to represent, quantify and communicate those gender controversies to enquiry on how neutrality is being operationalised in OSM.
The results will be open and will be returned to the OSM community to inform decisions in relation to their governance, which might be applicable to other cases of digital goods.
Team
Dr Carlos Cámara-Menoyo, Senior Research Software Engineer, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick
Dr Timothy Monteath, Assistant Professor, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick
Dr Selene Yang, Geochicas (Founder), Wikimedia Foundation, Research fellow at Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Dr Jorge Leon-Casero, Associate Professor, Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)
Dr Rachel Palmen, Senior Researcher, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Prof. Sara (Meg) Davis, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick
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