2022:  YouthMappers: A Hybrid Movement Design for the OpenStreetMap Community of Communities
Channel: State of the Map
Date: 16/10/2022

https://media.ccc.de/v/state-of-the-map-2022-academic-track-19305-youthmappers-a-hybrid-movement-design-for-the-openstreetmap-community-of-communities



The YouthMappers experience lends itself to explore interesting questions about the cultural and organizational aspects of data production and usage practices in OpenStreetMap, in order to improve them. First, this study aims to identify what are some of the qualitative and quantitative characteristics distinguishing the performance of YouthMappers as an academic-based community within OSM. Second, this study aims to better understand how the design approach taken by and on behalf of YouthMappers reinforces an identity as unique contributors.

Increasingly ubiquitous open spatial technologies offer the opportunity for new actors to participate in creating knowledge about the places where they live and work, and where they connect to others around the world. University students are one set of actors who have grown significantly in their visibility and contributions to OpenStreetMap, in part through the establishment of YouthMappers in 2015. This inclusive international network of university-based, youth-led, faculty-mentored chapters on more than 320 campuses in 66+ countries works to mobilize and support university student mapping action that responds to humanitarian and development needs by creating and using an ecosystem of data and tools centered on OpenStreetMap. 

The YouthMappers experience lends itself to explore interesting questions about the cultural and organizational aspects of data production and usage practices in OpenStreetMap, in order to improve them. In this case, we explore these aspects as they occur within and through the academic sector, particularly through the hands and eyes of student youth. As a consortium design, this networked set of local groups works on the one hand, to create and use data on their local campuses and home communities, and on the other, to remotely contribute data on imagery-visible features in response to humanitarian, development, and knowledge needs wherever they may occur around the globe. Furthermore, they act not only within the OSM “community of communities” framework (Solís 2016), but also within an existing global infrastructure of academic institutions with its own set of shared educational aims, knowledge generating practices, and cultural norms. Meanwhile, students are motivated both by learning and using new skills and workforce competencies as well as by the opportunity to participate in the world’s largest volunteered geographic information project and the activities that make common good use of the data. So how do YouthMappers navigate these different aims within these different spaces of action?

To address this question, two aspects of this experience are the focus of attention in this study. First, this study aims to identify what are some of the qualitative and quantitative characteristics distinguishing the performance of YouthMappers as an academic-based community within OSM. Second, this study aims to better understand how the design approach taken by and on behalf of YouthMappers reinforces an identity as unique contributors.

The presentation first will provide a description and justification for the purposeful design of the YouthMappers consortium (Solís et al. 2018) within the context of OpenStreetMap (Brovelli et al. 2019). The study will be contextualized with a review of literature on the current state of higher education, particularly with respect to a present tension around higher ed institutions’ purpose as sites for both workforce preparation and global citizenship. The latter point will be situated with reference to scholarship on the global targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as perhaps the predominant discourse for international action across humanitarian domains. This review sets up three interlocking hypotheses that the evidence is anticipated to reject:
H1: (Action-of-Performance) Participating youth either map only locally or remotely, but not both; 
H2: (Hybrid-Roles) Participating youth cannot simultaneously pursue personal aims to prepare themselves for the workforce and to express their identities as global citizens; and
H3: (Movement-Minded) Participating youth cannot articulate the impacts/benefits of actions undertaken for broader communities or society through their work with OSM, nor identify the roles/contributions of youth action in this work for the common good.

Data to test the first hypothesis relate to performance and include a range of metrics of participation (Andal et al. 2022; Boateng et al. 2022; Walachosky et al., 2022); statistics of known users (Anderson 2022), and a review of data from other studies of YouthMappers’ editing contributions (e.g., Mahmud et al. 2022). Data to test the second hypotheses relate to identity and come from the long-running student-authored blogs (Hite et al., 2018), as well as a global survey of YouthMap