Christoph Hormann
Christoph Hormann (imagico) is a freelance graphics designer, methodology developer, and consultant specializing in the production of visualizations of the Earth’s surface - ranging from realistic 3D views to traditional maps. He has been involved in OpenStreetMap since 2013, in particular in map design. He is a maintainer of OpenStreetMap-Carto, the default map featured on the OpenStreetMap website and regularly writes about map design topics as well as social, organizational and technical matters of significance for the OSM community on his blog.
imagico
Session
Maps have been essential in the development and the success of OpenStreetMap. They were and still are the single most important medium of communication across language and culture gaps between members of the OSM community.
Maps in that role however - as a shared visualization of the work of the mappers, providing an identical picture to everyone viewing them, and this way facilitating communication - seem to be on the way out, at least as far as OpenStreetMap is concerned. It is not unlikely that in a few years, for better or worse, the only forms of visualization of OSM data most community members will know and use on a daily basis are individualized depictions in the user interfaces of digital tools.
This talk is going to discuss this development and the social role of maps in OpenStreetMap in its historical context and explain how the OSM community is essentially unprepared for this foreseeable loss of a central means of communication among its contributors.