Paid-Editing, Open Datasets, and AI-Mapping Tools: A Panel Discussion with Corporations Active in OpenStreetMap
2021-07-10 , Track 2 - Panels and Workshops

This panel will bring together a few major corporations active in the OSM Community to talk about their mapping activity and larger involvement within OSM. We will cover the release of datasets, development of mapping tools, and the increasing amount of paid-editing in OSM. Companies include ESRI, Facebook, among others yet to be confirmed.

The panelists are Deane Kensock (Esri), Ben Clark (Facebook), Jinal Foflia (Grab), Lukas Martinelli (Mapbox)


The panel discussion will be broken into 3 sections:

  1. Introduction (5 minutes): Brief Introduction of Panelists and their involvement in OSM, as quantified in existing work. This includes a very brief overview of paid-editing in OSM and how the scale has increased in recent years, along with the adoption of AI-assisted mapping, and any new datasets made available. This will be positioned within the results of the OSMF 2021 Community Survey and briefly discuss the distinction between corporations as data consumers and corporations as data producers.

  2. Formal Panelist Introductions (5-8 minutes each). Each speaker will have a few minutes to describe their company's involvement in and use of OSM.

  3. Moderated Discussion (40 - 60 minutes). The audience will have the chance to pose questions in a separate chat / shared document and the moderator will collate questions and ask the panelists. Example questions to the panelists include:
    - Why OSM? There were likely many possible platforms that your company considered, what was the reason for choosing OSM, and what was this process like? Was there immediate buy-in, or not?
    - If local volunteer mapping communities are active in the regions you are mapping, how do you communicate and work with them? Are you supporting them directly in any way?
    - How does your company intend to contribute to OSM? Is it in datasets? technologies? mapping expertise?

The list of panel participants has yet to be finalized.

The panel will be moderated by Jennings Anderson, an OSM researcher who has written about and continues to research the involvement of corporations in OSM.


Co-authors:

(Panelists yet to be confirmed)

Dr. Jennings Anderson is a GeoInformation Scientist specializing in OpenStreetMap data analysis. His contributor-centric approach to OSM emphasizes questions regarding the evolution of the global community of mappers and how the data gets produced.