I have just went and rewatched the recording of Monica's 11-minute talk.
While I was dismissive of her arguments four years ago, now I see that
all of her points were valid, and are still valid. We have done nothing
wrt diversity in our project. HOT did something, some local communities
did (e.g. GeoChicas), but OpenStreetMap in general is still white, male
and disregarding of any external point of view.
The tagging issue Monica raised was more about the proposal process in
general, and most of us (I hope) have known it to be highly flawed. But
the case with the childcare was telling: not only voters did not know
what childcare was, they did not care. Significantly more people in the
world find childcare facilities and the distinction between childcares,
kindergartens and whatever more important that swinger clubs and
brothels, but these people are a minority in OSM, and since we have
meritocracy slash democracy (none of that actually, but that's often
heard), that means minorities are not effecting OSM.
Sadly, I have no idea how to fix this. Dave's reply shows we are still a
long way from being a diverse community where all opinions are heard and
not dismissed.
Ilya
26.07.2017 23:02, Frederik Ramm пишет:
Hi,
>
...
* Sadly the talk included the usual drive-by accusations of sexism in
OSM. It said, and I am not making this up: "There has been some work by
Monica Stephens that has discussed how new tag proposals for feminized
or (inaudible) spaces are given less, quote, attention" (this is
referring to a very badly researched 2013 article that essentially
contrsated took low vote outcome on a childcare tagging proposal with
brothels and swinger cluby in OSM to brand OSM sexist), and then went on
"also, one of our interviewees mentioned that she had, quote, heard of
women not being listened to or respected". -- What he's doing here is
quoting an anonymous source that is quoting an anonymous source that
says something about OSM, and that is good enough to make a sexism claim.
The whole talk did, it seems to me, slightly overrate the importance of
tagging discussions (they claimed to have interviewed 15 people but it
is unclear how they selected those 15), and therefore the discussion
that ensued was mostly around the question "how can we make sure that
everyone has a say in tagging discussions".
There seemed to be an underlying assumption that binding votes on
tagging, or at least a well-defined process to standardize and maintain
the global tagging ontology, was necessary (and not least, all those
autocratic editor writes need to submit to the community vote and not
invoke privilege to create presets that others must then follow).
I wouldn't say this has given me any new insights or ideas for the
future, but it is an interesting study in how (relative) outsiders
approach OSM.
I think we as a project really need to publish a more through, and more
visible, takedown on that 2013 Monica Stephens article though. At the
time I thought "oh well, bad research comes and goes, no need to start a
fight every time a researcher writes something wrong about OSM", but
that one seems to be found, believed in, and quoted by other researchers
just too much.
Bye
Frederik
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