2025-11-14 –, Area
Professor Lynne Coventry explores how participatory mapping like OpenStreetMap empowers communities but faces cybersecurity threats, highlighting the need for trust, awareness, and resilient strategies against data manipulation and malicious attacks.
Community maps such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) require community participation, trust, and data integrity.
For participatory community mapping, it's about empowering individuals to share local knowledge and influence local decisions, while for OSM, it's about a community of volunteers contributing to open data. From a cybersecurity perspective, this human element introduces risks, for example, malicious actors who might introduce false data, remove data, or block access until a ransom is paid. There is a need to raise community awareness and build resilience and recovery plans.
Professor Lynne Coventry is currently the Director of the CyberQuarter at Abertay University - bringing industry and academia closer together to explore cybersecurity challenges. Her area of expertise is human aspects of cybersecurity putting her interdisciplinary background of psychology, software engineering, and design thinking to good use. Previously she was research director for Northumbria's Multidisciplinary Research Theme: Human and Digital Design.