3 March 2026: Writing this at a Missing Maps “London” remote meeting, realizing that I’d never written a OSM diary about the research I did within the ecosystem. I’m so late! But I’d love to still write this down. This placeholder is cross-linked with my blog.

From October 2020 to June 2021, I conducted ethnographic research within the (humanitarian) OpenStreetMap universe, trying to understand how communities, crises, and corporations came together on OSM. My thesis was ultimately about how humanitarian technologies like open source maps are used and created in response to crisis, and the convoluted mix of humanitarian values, corporate interests, and international networks that intersect on the OpenStreetMap platform.

The project and community is incredibly complex, a confluence of humanitarian actors, technology workers, and crowdsourced labor. My initial questions focused on why people contribute to open-source platforms like OSM (and Wikipedia for that matter), but they later evolved into what role humanitarian mapping plays within the wider ecosystem of geospatial and mapping technologies it is a part of.

Increasingly, as this was just before the wave of new AI technologies, I found that OSM data was being used in order to train AI systems like those used for road detection, etc.

While the written work is in the process of publication (eventually!), there are a number of public videos that share some of my public-facing findings on the subject.

Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)

This talk shares my initial findings from this period, drawing from interviews and studies of political economy, science and technology studies, and humanitarianism. Social science methods might help us to better understand this changing period of OSM and HOT history, as it heads into the future.

Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain

… See full entry

This is cross-linked from my blog, posted on 11 July 2023

I recently joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in moderating their Community Working Group and Tech Working Group’s discussions on AI-Assisted Mapping.

This, in part, was a reminder that I (still!) haven’t published an OSM diary that summarises my MA research, and that publication is still process. But it was also a reminder that I have yet to really summarise or bring together what I have shared so far.

Here’s a short summary:

Moderation: “Perspectives on AI-Assisted Mapping”

• Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTtTh6gHEwI
• Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pfdDV9xSoo
• These two sessions - recorded as hour-long discussions with unrecorded 30 minute discussions at the end, were really interesting (and much-needed!) community spaces for the OSM community. I’m grateful to have been given the trust needed to facilitate, and learned a lot from folks there. Most notably, I think the discussion primarily ended up focusing not on “what we should be building” but what AI means to mappers in the first place (these being very different things)!

Talk: “Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)”

• Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0a84F0pdNU&t=351s
• Slides: Coming soon!
• This was given at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in 2021 in the form of a talk. It shared some of my initial thoughts around crisis mapping specifically, and citations in that direction. In particular, I focused a bit more on what defines the kinds of crises that become maps, and informational asymmetries within the community.

Talk: “Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain”

… See full entry