Five years ago i wrote about the 15th anniversary of OSM and my outlook into the next fifteen years. We now have the 20th anniversary. This is a bit early to review my predictions (with merely 1/3 of the time span covered having passed) – still i want to newly consider some of the topics i contemplated five years ago.

My big topic for the 15th anniversary was the idea that a separation might occur in the future between the original core idea of OpenStreetMap, the sharing and communication of local geographic knowledge by a cross cultural community of mappers through egalitarian, self determined cooperation and the project with the name of OpenStreetMap.

This scenario consisted of two components:

• the (back then increasingly visible) trend for OpenStreetMap to move away from the fundamental ideas and values it was created on.
• the possibility that this development might lead people to share and exchange their geographic knowledge increasingly through means outside of OpenStreetMap.

I want to look at both parts here a bit through the somewhat different perspective i have today, five years later.

OpenStreetMap changing

Previously my hypothesis that OpenStreetMap is – at large – moving clearly away from its original ideas and values was primarily backed by the observable trends in mapping, that the data in OpenStreetMap as well as the edits made were increasingly not founded in personal local knowledge of the people making the edits and their own, intrinsic desire to share that knowledge. It seems quite clear to me today, five years later, that this trend has not reverted, although i also have the distinct impression that is has not accelerated either. OpenStreetMap continues to attract mappers sharing their local geographic knowledge and it is good to see that this happens with an increasingly diverse geographic and cultural distribution. Bulk data additions and systematic volume edits not backed by local geographic knowledge have expanded significantly as well – hence no reversal of the trend – but it can’t be said that they are substantially further displacing local knowledge based mapping at this time. Or in other words: You could say the situation has stabilized a bit.

So much for the actual development of mapping in OpenStreetMap. Things look very different when you look at how OpenStreetMap is communicated in public and hence how the wider public perceives OpenStreetMap these days. This means public communication by individual community members, by the OpenStreetMap Foundation as well as – and this is the largest part probably – by third party organizations, be that businesses of all sizes, public institutions or other organizations of all kinds.

If you study this body of public communication about OpenStreetMap these days then the traditional ideals and values of OpenStreetMap are almost completely absent. You can find these being discussed in communications of individual community members with no organizational affiliations as well as some academic studies from the social sciences sector. But the vast majority of organizational communication about OpenStreetMap (and that is what tends to have the largest reach) presents OpenStreetMap these days as a collection of useful geodata that is largely produced by volunteers (with volunteers meaning unpaid workers and not implying either local knowledge or self-determination in what they map and how they map it).

Recent public communication of the OpenStreetMap Foundation is a good example for that – the page created for the 20th anniversary is framing OpenStreetMap exactly along these lines.

Normally you’d expect such a clear and almost universal trend in public communication to lead to mappers increasingly internalizing this framing of OpenStreetMap. Interestingly this does not seem to be the case though. As mentioned OpenStreetMap these days continues to recruit new mappers who map in the traditional way sharing their local knowledge of the areas around them in a self determined fashion and in egalitarian cooperation with the other mappers around them. They must have learned this either

• from legacy documentation that still exists
• from other mappers by imitation/direct communication
• from their local community through decentralized small group communication
• through their own bootstrapping process as the way to approach mapping in a way that seems natural to them.

That this is possible and practically happening at scale despite organized public communication in most cases drawing a very different picture of OpenStreetMap is a very positive trend.

The separation

The second element of my five years old prediction was the idea that the people who value the original idea of OpenStreetMap of cooperative collection and sharing of local knowledge might move to doing this increasingly outside of OpenStreetMap. So far there is not much concrete tendency in that direction visible. And, as discussed already, at the moment the traditional mapping values seem astonishingly strong in practical mapping in OpenStreetMap.

What this, however, indicates – and this is different from what i discussed five years ago – is that there is a widening schism within OpenStreetMap between how practical mapping and the social interactions that facilitate it actually happen and the perception of OpenStreetMap and mapping in the organizational world around OpenStreetMap.

It is best not to see this schism as a complete separation of communication bubbles with one being completely disconnected from the other, it is more like a strong cultural divide.

If this schism is the precursor to a true separation as discussed in the past or if it can be a stable way to combine the social necessities of cross cutural cooperation in the form of the traditional values of mapping with the economic necessities of capitalism is not yet decided. It will probably largely depend on if people on the organizational side of the schism develop enough respect and appreciation for the social necessities on the other side. I am sceptical here (as are probably many of my readers). But i also like to point out that a lot of the organizations around OpenStreetMap have a lot of smart people working for them who are, in principle, capable of understanding these fragile inter-relationships and accordingly are able to make responsible decisions. The question is going to be: Will they?

An experiment in social cooperation

The ultimate long term question (and long term here means this is not a matter that can be determined reliably in a 15 or 20 years time frame) is if the cooperative collection of local geographic knowledge across cultures in an egalitarian and self determined fashion is something that can work at scale. As hinted at in the comments of my 15th anniversary post this is not clear, even if it has worked amazingly well during much of the past 20 years. The null hypothesis on this would be: It can’t, OpenStreetMap will necessarily either vanish or turn into a classical organization with a social hierarchy (i.e. become non-egalitarian) – at best with a framework of representative democracy of some sort.

I would very much like to see the thoughts of others on this question, especially if they differ from the null hypothesis.