Anne Lee Steele
Anne is a researcher, facilitator and artist. She previously spent ~2 years with the OpenStreetMap community as an ethnographer during her graduate studies, and now facilitates mapathons for the Missing Maps project. She makes media art with maps, and is a fellow with the Software Sustainability Institute in 2026 with the aim of connecting academic and creative computing communities.
aleesteele
Session
A few years ago, I gave a talk at 2022's State of the Map about the community behind OpenStreetMap from an anthropologist's perspective, with a specific focus on the developments to the ecosystem since then. It asks questions: what has happened to satellite imagery? What are the crises that are constitutive of the community now? How have emerging markets affected mapping in the years since the original ethnographic study was organized? Building on the previous format of the talk given in 2022, this conference presentation will ask if the original premise of crises, communities, and capitalism still stands, a few years later.