## 3 Current Developments
### Contributor Analysis
#### 3.2.3 Motivation, Behavior and Gender Dimensions  
A number of studies in recent years also provided more insight about the discrepancies in contributor motivation, behavior or gender dimensions in VGI projects, such as OSM. In most cases, an extensive survey was conducted to evaluate the most detailed information about the contributors of the project. [PERSON] [125] and [PERSON] and [PERSON] [23] showed in a comprehensive study which criteria increase the contributor motivation in VGI projects. Similar studies were conducted with focus on UGC platforms, such as Wikipedia or other open source software development communities [7], whereas [PERSON] _et al_. [131] compared the motivating factors for several online portals, such as OSM, Google Map Maker, Foursquare, Panoramio, Facebook and Wikipedia. Furthermore, the different factors have been classified by the authors in intrinsic and extrinsic or constructive and negative classes. Table 2 provides an overview of the classification schemas based on the aforementioned studies. The motivation of the different project members was one of the main criteria the researchers investigated in their studies. However, demographic factors, such as age, gender or educational background of the project's participants, were also analyzed in more detail. The results showed that the majority of OSM contributors, _i.e_., more than 97%, were males [23, 132, 133]. For other online portals, such as Foursquare or Facebook, the participant data did not show this biased gender distribution; however, the female participation rate dropped substantially when geographic information was \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Constructive Side**} \\ \hline
**Intrinsic** & **Extrinsic** & **Negative Side** \\ \hline Altruism & Social reward/relations & Mischief/vandalism \\ Fun/recreation & Career & Malice or criminal intent \\ Learning/personal enrichment & Personal reputation & \\ Unique ethos & Community/project goal & \\ Self-expression/image & System trust & \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: VGI motivating factors (paraphrased from [PERSON] [125] and [PERSON] _et al_. [7]). Figure 4: _Cont._introduced, for instance during the geotagging procedure for images or posts on the social networking platforms [72, 73]. The comparison of contributor gender distribution between different mapping platforms showed that women and men contribute to Google Map Maker at equal rates, whereas the number of female contributors significantly dropped when considering contributions to OSM [72]. However, these findings differ from the results by [PERSON] _et al_. [73], where OSM and Google Map Maker showed equally low female participatory values. The analysis of the OSM contributor age distribution revealed that the majority of contributors (>60%) are between 20 and 40 years old, and about 20% of the mappers are 40 years or older [23, 72]. The contributors also provided information about their educational background during the surveys, and the results showed that 63%-78% had a college, university or higher education degree [23, 72, 133]. Many research articles stated in the past that VGI is mostly contributed by non-experts [12] or volunteers who are untrained and unqualified [19, 67, 134]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [135] summarized that VGI is collected and edited by a heterogeneous online community with different backgrounds and application areas in mind. However, the conducted surveys did not support these statements entirely [72, 125, 133]. Almost 50% of the respondents of each survey had degrees or worked in the fields of geography, geomatics, urban planning or computer/information sciences, highlighting that the OSM community does not necessarily only constitutes of GIS amateurs, as is oftentimes speculated [125]. Next to the aforementioned socioeconomic factors, the social interaction between contributors in OSM and their individual contribution patterns played a major role in a number of research articles.