Related activites: Talking diversity!

Sorry for our long break in posting project news! A lot of things happened in the meantime… Before proceeding with news on the fem2map project, I would like to draw your attention to related activities in the community.

Alyssa Wright did an awesome presentation at State of the Map US on participation and communication cultures in OpenStreetMap, titled “The Threads of OSM Discussions: Are the Doors Really Open?“ If you haven’t seen it yet, please have a look at her slides. For more context watch her talk on Vimeo.

Her talk inspired lively discussions on diversity in OSM. For building momentum a diversity mailinglist was set up. Please feel free to join in!

Alyssa will also give a keynote at the State of the Map this weekend – so stay tuned. Also in the programme will be Yuwei Lin, who will present some of the fem2map project results.

Workshop at the Digital:Earth 2013 teachers training, Salzburg

Fachdidaktikzentrum für Geographie und Geoinformatik Salzburg (teachers training centre for geography and geoinformation in Salzburg) invited us to speak about gender issues in cartography on Digital:Earth 2013 – a training event for teachers with a focus on geoinformation.

Since most of the participants were new to OpenStreetMap, the workshop also included an introduction to OSM and ideas, how OSM can be used in school projects. Introducing students from early ages in collaborative projects using ICT tools might be an important prerequisite for more diverse contributors to VGI in the future.

Our presentation led to a lively discussion on the relevance of OSM, girls in technology, as well as geocaching and statistics.

Presentation at FEMcamp Vienna

Silvia and Manuela participated at FEMcamp in Vienna on March 16, 2013 – the first barcamp in Vienna with a focus on women topics. We offered a session on OpenStreetMap (What is OSM? How to contribute? And some results of our research concerning women in OSM). Please find our slides here:

Unfortunately, the slides are in German only. There will be English presentations in the future.

Invitation to our online survey

Dear visitors and colleagues,

We are currently conducting a study regarding your personal experiences and attitudes towards platforms with user-generated content, particularly OpenStreetMap. Completing the whole survey will take 10–15 minutes.

All participants have the chance to win one of five 30€ Amazon vouchers. Of course we will handle your personal data confidentially, and will not pass them to any third party.

Thank you for participating, we appreciate your help!
Silvia Klettner & Manuela Schmidt

Update, March 10: Our survey is closed now. 516 people completed the questionnaire. The five winners have been contacted. Thank you very much for your participation!

Presentation at workshop on “Map creation from user generated data”, Hannover

At the workshop “Map creation from user generated data”, which took place prior to Intergeo and Kartographentag on October 8, 2012 in Hannover, Renate and Manuela presented first results of the project in their talk “The Impact of the Contributor in VGI projects”.

The slides can be accessed at the workshop website.

Our expert researcher Yuwei Lin gives a talk

Renate Steinmann, Yuwei Lin, Manuela Schmidt, Silvia Klettner

As part of the project, we invited our expert researcher Yuwei Lin of the University of Salford, UK to give a talk at the Research Group Cartography on September 12, 2012:

Demystifying the relationships between women and maps

Abstract. Too often, articles with headlines such as “Why women cannot read maps and men lose their keys” appear in the news. Pseudoscience or not, these instances suggest that maps are definitely socio-technical artefacts, shaped by (and also shaping) creators and consumers’ behaviours and (inter)actions, embodying certain ideologies and identities and ideologies.
In this talk, Dr Lin will draw on feminist theorising and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to exemplify how gender is explicitly or implicitly embedded in innovation and design of a technical service or a product, and to highlight the importance of improving our understandings of specific, culturally, politically, socially and materially embodied identities, epistemologies, and practices that make up technical systems. She will also share her ongoing research on gender and free/libre open source software (FLOSS) to respond the growing interest in open source technologies and crowd sourced data in cartography. Her participatory observation and interventions at some events and online groups will demonstrate how women actively engage with free/libre open source software and how different dimensions of engagement and assemblages of social and material practices shape innovation or uses of technologies. Methodologies and social research methods will also be discussed in this part. Overall, this talk should shed light on socio-technical dynamics and influences of crowd sourcing in an open innovation system.

Please find the slides here.

Welcome to the fem2map webpage

Welcome to the fem2map webpage!

fem2map is a project by the Research Group Cartography and Salzburg Research studying diversity and gender aspects in VGI. Large parts of our research will focus on OpenStreetMap (OSM), as the most successful and extensive VGI project so far.

This project is funded by BMVIT within the structural research program FEMtech fFORTE.

This page tries to keep you up-to-date with presentations and publications resulting from the project. So please stay tuned.