Hi, today I was pointed to a recent, open-access scientific paper called "Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap". This open-access paper is available here
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3044581 In the context of armchair mapping, but especially of data imports (and recently, machine-generated OSM data) there's always been the discussion between those who say "careful, too much importing will hurt the growth of a local community", and others who say "this import is going to kick-start a local community, let's do it!" Until now this has been a rather un-proven matter of belief, and the general mood is usually in favour of a quick build-up of data (through remote mapping, importing, or machine learning) instead of a take-it-slow approach that would wait for a community to form and take matters into their own hands. The paper quoted above uses OSM as a research object and finds that in certain ways imports in OSM have indeed harmed community growth. The paper attempts to provide insights helpful for all kinds of user-generated knowledge projects (not necessarily OSM), and draws the following conclusion: "While information seeding could be useful to encourage the production of distant forms of follow-on knowledge, it might demotivate and under-provide more mundane and incremental follow-on information. Accordingly, if managers are interested in leveraging pre-existing information to spur the development of online communities, they might be better served by withholding some pre-existing information and provide community members with some space to create knowledge from scratch—even if such knowledge already exists in an external source. This policy allows community members to become invested in the community and develop ownership over the knowledge." Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
