On Saturday 13 June 2015, Frederik Ramm wrote: > [...] > > 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."
Thanks for pointing to these texts, very interesting reading. I fear though that critical discussion of the matter will most likely be difficult since the perceived need for humanitarian mapping in events of crisis and the perceived prominence of altruistic motives in those activities is so large making even the basic notion that something good does not justify something bad seems unimportant. Critical reflection on your activities in such a context is very difficult. One important point where i think Gwilym is wrong is the idea that proactive humanitarian mapping will lead to a true homogenization of the map. First of all none of the organized mapping activities focusses on those areas that are worst mapped in OSM so they increase differences rather than reducing them. Efforts in true homogenization would only have a chance on a much longer time horizon (i.e. decades) and none of the organizations involved in humanitarian mapping think on that time scale. But more importantly the colonalization, control and "power over space" is already there in the form of global coverage high resolution imagery. Remote mapping essentailly makes this information more accessible. If this is a good or a bad thing can of course be discussed but OSM is not really the best address to blame here in any case. This is not meant to say remote mapping in OSM is generally a good thing, many of the arguments against it have a lot of merit. But the main question should be if and how this hampers development of true grassroots mapping by locals when performed within OSM and thereby conteracts the primary purpose of the project and not if remote mapping itself, i.e. extracting semantic information from remotely sensed data that exists anyway is morally questionable in general (which is fairly frivolous IMO). And i think there are a lot of other areas in OSM that represent at least as efficient (and therefore damaging) means of cultural imperialism as remote mapping. My favorite example is always map rendering, there is a real lot of more or less subtle cultural bias in that. OSM does not only need more mappers with diverse cultural backgrounds, it also need more diverse input in development and design and the barriers for those are much higher than for mapping. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
