Investigating Corporate Editors in OpenStreetMap
Room: Tsavo Hall
Sunday, 12:30
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)
This event will not be recorded.
Slides from our presentation at State of the Map 2024, OSM Science Track
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- Alex Hoferek
A discussion of the results of a survey distributed to corporate editors working in OSM.
In recent years, OpenStreetMap (OSM) has evolved from being a Volunteered Geographic Information Project to one of the most successful Geospatial Crowdsourcing Platforms in the world. Volunteers, governments, and corporations all make contributions to its global map. Corporate editors (CEs) are the latest entrant in the OSM ecosystem, and their prolific contributions have drawn significant interest from the OSM community as well as the scientific community. In 2018, the OpenStreetMap Foundation introduced a set of Organized Editing Guidelines in response to community outcry related to the edits made by these CEs and a perceived lack of dialogue and transparency between corporations and the larger community. Previous research has focused on the changing landscape of OSM users with the growth of corporate editing, cataloguing the global footprint of corporate editing and the map features that CEs are editing. Others have studied the impacts of having a dedicated workforce that can make significant changes to the map in a very short period of time, as CEs were shown to have different editing habits than volunteer mappers. This study focuses on the CEs themselves, as while other research has explored the impacts of their existence, they have not explored who these editors are, and the reason for their employment. We sought to learn more about the demographic makeup, careers, and motivations and community relationships of these individuals. With these three research objectives, we created an anonymous mixed methods survey that was distributed directly to every listed CE account provided in accordance with the Organized Editing Guidelines on the OSMwiki. Non-exclusive groups were created prior to the collection of results based on previous literature and our research objectives. These groups were then compared to each other using ANOVA and compared to the population using T-tests in R . A non-exclusive typology was also created after results were collected to allow for further analysis of results. This typology was based on the statistical distribution of answers to key questions and it, paired with the groups created based on literature, allowed for a multi-pronged analysis. The findings reveal that corporate editing in OSM is a legitimate career path and can be more nuanced than simply adding or editing features on the map. Though the most popular employment length was one year, some participants had been employed for upwards of five years. There is a group of CEs that spend almost no time directly editing the map in OSM, yet – on average – have been employed for longer than those who spend the most time editing. Given that over a third of participants mapped in OSM prior to their employment as a CE, it was not surprising that there are ties between CEs and the OSM community, but we found that there was a link between community involvement and job satisfaction, as there was significant overlap between the most satisfied and most involved respondents. When editing, all respondents edited a variety of features, no specialization where a CE would only work with a single feature type was seen. Some editors edited the map before making it a career, some started editing on their free time after getting a job as a corporate editor, and others do not map outside of work. There is also a variety of salary types with an hourly wage being the most popular, but other CEs being paid a monthly or annual salary. A profile of a typical CE was created using the mode of each question’s response and reveals many are enjoying their jobs and would like to continue. There is insight into the workplace by depicting the resources available to editors and a general framework of their work week, with 8-hour days, one project meeting per week, and good relationships between colleagues. There is not much direct interaction between the typical CE and members of the community, but they do use community resources (like OSMwiki) and consider its status as an open project important to their employ in the field. Unfortunately, we encountered several challenges in reaching out to individual editors as the organizations they work for explicitly prevented them from answering the survey. This had a significant impact on our ability to collect responses, as over half the CE community was made unavailable to this study. Due to low participation numbers, we must establish that our results do not serve as a definite representation of CEs. Low participation was also the rationale for the multi-pronged analysis, as we sought to learn as much as possible from a limited population. Though all CEs reserve the right to not participate in this study, the blanket refusal seen by some corporations is at odds with the autonomous agency which has been a tradition of OSM. At one company, all direct messages sent to any of their CE accounts on OSM redirect to the inbox of their manager, which raises similar questions. While our results may not provide a faithful representation of CEs, our work furthers conversation regarding these workers and broaches the topic of their agency.