Crowdsourcing Cartography

Liriel — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:02:02 +0000

One of the things discussed at the iDiplomacy symposium last week was the crowdsourcing and democratization of map making. In some countries where there are few maps available companies like Google have been able to rely on local knowledge to produce maps that are more complete and accurate than professionally created ones.

The New York Times has an interesting article that talks about the growing involvement of the public in the development in online maps:

People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.

“It is a huge shift,” said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.”

That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.

Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.

Not surprisingly for a product that relies on public input about territorial detail, politics can sometimes enter the fray.

Some of the most remarkable efforts of amateur map makers are in countries where few, if any, digital maps existed. Google first tested a tool called Map Maker in India, where people immediately began tracing and labeling roads and buildings on top of satellite images provided by Google.

When Google released the tool more broadly last year, Faraz Ahmad, a 26-year-old programmer from Pakistan who lives in Glasgow, took one look at the map of India and decided he did not want to see his homeland out-mapped by its traditional rival. So he began mapping Pakistan in his free time, using information from friends, family and existing maps. Mr. Ahmad is now the top contributor to Map Maker, logging more than 41,000 changes.

Maps are political, of course, and community-edited maps can set off conflicts. When Mr. Ahmad tried to work on the part of Kashmir that is administered by Pakistan, he found that Map Maker wouldn’t allow it. He said his contributions were finally accepted by the Map Maker team, which is led by engineers based in India, but only after a long e-mail exchange.

At his request, Google is now preventing further changes to the region, after people in India tried to make it part of their country, Mr. Ahmad said. “Whenever you have a Pakistani and an Indian doing something together, there is a political discussion or dispute.”

Google isn’t the only company to rely on the public to collect map data. Sometimes collecting the information can be a social event, and participants feel as though they are contributing to society:

“Seeing an error on a map is the kind of thing that gnaws at me,” he said. “By being able to fix it, I feel like the world is a better place in a very small but measurable way.”

John L. Kittle Jr., a 55-year-old engineer, was one participant. In the past, Mr. Kittle has corrected street names in Atlanta and improved the map for his home town of Decatur, Ga. Recently an acquaintance mentioned that she lived in a new condo development, and Mr. Kittle added it to the map.

Contributors to OpenStreetMap have turned mapmaking into a social activity. Last month, a group of some 200 volunteers in Atlanta braved the wind and drizzle to collect map data across the city. Armed with GPS devices, cameras and paper maps of neighborhoods, they added missing alleys, public art, restaurants and hotels.

Friending the Way to Peace

Liriel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:23:17 +0000

Facebook has a new portal at peace.facebook.com, which tracks the friend connections made each day by people of different countries, religions and political affiliations. TechCrunch has a write up here:

“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”

The geographic pairings include Israel-Palestine (5,788 in the last 24 hours), Albania-Serbia (9,257), India-Pakistan (7,160) and Greece-Turkey (16,368).

The religious parings include Muslim-Jewish (1,361 new friendships in the last 24 hours), Christian-atheist (57,749), Sunni-Shiite (677) and Muslim-Christian (72,935)

Politically, there have been 31,678 new U.S. conservative-liberal pairings made in the last day.

Facebook also lists some of the sample comments:

Daniela Bryan I think we need to find peace within ourselves as human beings before we can attain external peace. We are moving in the right direction and if everyone does their part starting with themselves we will get there.

Rose Rackabones very nice idea but i don’t know how it can effact those who are in heavily conflicted areas like afganistan. Every little thing counts when it comes to trying to make everyone friends, but it’s hardly us, the people who are posting on this who need to push. We already want peace. It’s the powerhungry politicians who start wars and the uneducated poor who need to be taught that violence is not a means of communication.

Charlene Barker I am very supportive of peace, especially HR808 for a Dept of Peace.

Elliot Thomas Rosen Seems like a great idea. Just curious, concerning the “Friendships on Facebook” graphs, has the data been adjusted for the natural increase in Facebook connections? I wonder what non-profit organizations could do if these metrics were made publicly available. Additionally, perhaps there are applications that groups can use to find like-minded people to organize for a common cause.

Ali Ab Peace: Life, Faith, Love.

The Facebook portal is part of a large Peace Dot directory being organized by Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab:

“Many are pessimistic about peace, but our Stanford team sees a different trend. Today many good things are happening. To highlight work that increases peace, we organized “Peace Dot” and invited some partners to join us for the alpha launch in October 2009.

“The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com. At that page orgs share their work. At Stanford, we gather Peace Dot pages into a directory.”

Some of the other organizations in the Peace Dot directory include:

iDiplomacy » Pakistan

Crowdsourcing Cartography

Friending the Way to Peace