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The democratic stakes of mapmaking: a cross-community panel

Every map embeds choices: what to show, what to omit, what to centre, who is included as a stakeholder, who decides on the legend. Most of these choices are invisible to the people who use the resulting maps as inputs into their daily lives — and into democratic decisions, from a local town-planning vote to a national policy debate.

This panel asks who, and through what processes, should be in charge of those choices, and how communities like OpenStreetMap, official mapping agencies and emerging civic-cartographic movements can collectively raise the democratic stakes of mapmaking.

Animated by Matthieu Chatry, coordinator of La République des Cartes and three panelists from complementary horizons :

  • Christian Quest, OSM contributor and community member and currently Product owner of Panoramax

  • Ksenia Ermoshina, researcher at the CNRS, specifically at the Centre Internet & Société. She works on numerous projects concerning digital practices and related democratic issues. More about Ksenia Ermoshina

  • Françoise Bahoken is a geography researcher at Gustave Eiffel University. Her work focuses particularly on the theoretical and methodological aspects of mapping the flows and movements observed in geographic space. More about Françoise Bahoken

The discussion will explore:

  • Map-making as a civic act: when is mapping a form of citizenship, and what would it take for map-reading to become one too?

  • The role of national mapping agencies in opening up their data, infrastructure and methods to civil society - what to expect

  • The OSM model as a democratic experiment: its strengths, its limits, its blind spots, and what it could learn from other community-cartography traditions (counter-cartography, indigenous mapping, popular-education mapping).

Matthieu Chatry

Matthieu Chatry coordinates La République des Cartes at IGN, the French national mapping agency. His real craft, though, is the animation of learning communities. For the past decade - first with leChaudron.io, then as an independent facilitator under the Amuseurs name, he has designed workshops and built communities of practice to help people of all backgrounds build a confident, hands-on relationship with digital tools and most recently generative AI.
He now brings the same approach to maps: animating the coalition of partners and organisers behind La République des Cartes.