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Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap

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Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap
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OSM is characterized both by its map as well as the active community of the millions of mappers who produce it. Recently, many large corporations have been hiring editors to contribute to the OSM database. We recently explored the influence these corporate editors are having on the map by first considering the history of corporate involvement in the community and then analyzing historical quarterly-snapshot OSM-QA-Tiles to show where and what these corporate editors are mapping. We found that cumulatively, millions of corporate edits have a global footprint, but corporations vary in geographic reach, edit types, and quantity. While corporations currently have a major impact on road networks, non-corporate mappers edit more buildings and points-of-interest: representing the majority of all edits, on average. Corporate editors represent just the latest stage in the evolution of corporate involvement. We therefore raise questions about how the OSM community—and researchers—might proceed as corporate editing grows and evolves as a mechanism for expanding the map for multiple uses.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Yeah, so first I'd like to share this paper that I wrote last spring called Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap. I'm going to go through a little bit about what it was, the results, and try to do that
in like five minutes. Okay, so I wrote this paper with Deepta Sarkar at the National University of Singapore and Laysha Palin at University of Colorado Boulder. And yeah, it's called Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap. And so this is about corporate editing. Corporate editing is about data
teams and these are teams of employees that edit the map as part of their profession. There's a handful of data team people in here. Sorry, there we go. This is a form of what the community is calling organized editing. This is kind
of an all-encompassing label to describe groups of contributors editing with a common goal in a unified manner. And this is what I found to be the latest stage in the evolution of corporate involvement in OSM. This certainly isn't the beginning of corporate involvement in OSM, but rather a
new stage in the evolution. And finally, if you've been following the mailing list and such, it can be a little bit contentious in the community. I think that some people are very suspicious of corporate intent, data use. The mailing list can be a little heated. And so last November the foundation released
the organized editing guidelines and one requirement in these guidelines is that organized editing teams maintain a list of usernames associated with their activities. And so this time last year each of these companies were maintaining lists of usernames for their data teams. And so these became
the ten companies that we were studying. So Amazon, Apple, DevSeed, Facebook, Grab, Cart, Mapbox, Microsoft, Telenav, and Uber. I keep doing that. And so here's an example of like a username list. And as you can see here,
this page has over a hundred revisions. And so the data teams are keeping these lists up to date with who the members are. And so that's great. That lets us kind of track it and we can then create this. And this is a map of where these ten corporations have been contributing since 2014.
Sorry. So we can break this down by the corporation. Nothing's too surprising here. We see Facebook has basically all of Thailand is glowing
there. Microsoft's been really interested in Australia. Something I didn't know at the time. And we see Mapbox, Apple, Cart, a lot of kind of just full globe interest. So here's what the numbers look like.
Since 2014, there's about 17 million edits total by about a thousand different contributors. If we break it out by object type and then by year,
we see that... And this only had data going up to 2019. Yeah. Pretty impressive, the amount of roads edited and new buildings collectively across all the corporations in 2018. Okay. So next we looked at the
percentage of the total editing activity data teams are responsible for in the areas where they're active. Kind of on average around the globe. So there's a lot of information contained in here. I guess one of the... Yeah. So I can talk to you about those later if you're interested
specifically. But maybe the big takeaway is if you take... This is the kind of compliment to that. And this is saying that for areas where corporate teams are active, on average, data teams are responsible, are now responsible for about 70% of the road editing on average around
the globe. Noncorporate editors, however, are still responsible for the majority of all edits. About 70%. So this includes the rest of the edits to the buildings, POIs, amenities, et cetera. So... Yeah. Again, this is only... This is the average of the areas where corporate editing is happening. So this isn't just a global
average, but where it's happening rather. I just think this is really fun. If you look at, like, this is just the Facebook team, but all the teams look like this. If you plot edits per day, you find these kind of 52 groups representing five-day weeks with a couple three-day weekends. Yeah. Okay. So what's
next? So really tried to kind of take a step back and be really objective about this. And I didn't want to get into the politics of corporate editing as much as get into the history, quantify it, describe what's happening, where
it's happening. And next step is to dig in deeper into, like, what is the larger impact on the map, communities, and that's not necessarily what we measured, but this is where my current work is looking. So... Yeah. I have a couple kind of questions that I'm trying to look into right now
on the future of corporate editing and OSM and where this is all going. So with that, thank you. If you want to read the whole paper, it's open access at that address or find me this weekend and I'd love to talk more about it.