As the geographer and GI scientist Michael Goodchild coined the term “volunteered geographic information” (VGI) in 2009 in contrast to geographic information derived from traditional methods of making geography, he was referring to the declining barrier for amateurs and laypersons to contribute and “consume” geographic information since the introduction of Web 2.0. In this way, VGI can be seen as a classic example of Citizen Science in geographic information (e.g. Sarretta et al. 2020). The most prominent and particularly successful example of such a VGI project is OpenStreetMap (OSM). OpenStreetMap is an open-source project founded in 2004 that has become known as the “Wikipedia of Maps”. Thousands of OSM mappers are now active in contributing to this world-wide project of an open geodatabase, and the maps created from the data are increasingly used for private and public purposes. Building on early critical research that found that participation and representation in OSM was never evenly distributed, our recent research results show that with the success of projects like OpenStreetMap, they become increasingly interesting also for other actors – the landscape of actors is changing. "Craft mappers" – as volunteers who participate in OSM in their spare time call themselves (e.g. Hormann 2020) – are now being joined by large technology and transportation companies as well as by humanitarian organisations that both contribute and use OSM data. In the face of these new developments, questions arise such as: Is this even still VGI or Citizen Science? Or, who now influences projects like OSM and determines how they are governed? And eventually, how do these new players change the internal structure of VGI projects?
Mots clés : Volunteered Geographic Information|OpenStreetMap|Institutionalisation|Political Geography|Critical Cartography
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