New paper alert! Disparity, Instability, and Power in the Crowdmapping Ecosystem by @resieber.bsky.social and me for the Journal of Community Informatics. openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/Jo... - ThreadSky

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anabrandusescu.bsky.social • 78 days ago

New paper alert! Disparity, Instability, and Power in the Crowdmapping Ecosystem by @resieber.bsky.social and me for the Journal of Community Informatics.

https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6071

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anabrandusescu.bsky.social•78 days ago

"We reflect on 5 community-based crowdmapping apps in Canada with goals of fighting densification, highlighting lack of affordable housing and family-oriented greenspaces, promoting community assets, increasing findability of healthy food sources, and collecting perceptions of university spaces."

anabrandusescu.bsky.social•78 days ago

We found the crowdmapping ecosystem:

1. faced interoperability challenges for tech implementation, which brought into sharp relief disparate skill levels and resource capacities of developers and communities as well as ability to respond to almost daily modifications in hardware, software & data;

anabrandusescu.bsky.social•78 days ago

2. relied on an ever-shifting network of individuals and organizations because of unsustainable business models serving a top-down governance; and

3. exposed power differentials among funders, tech-for-good nonprofits, private sector hardware & software providers, & underlying non-human actors.

anabrandusescu.bsky.social•78 days ago

"Lessons learned from this ecosystem inform crowdmapping as it evolves and engages newer actors and technologies like AI, which further inform community-based organizations as well as researchers and philanthropic funders who may promote overly complex solutions to suit particular agendas."

anabrandusescu.bsky.social•78 days ago

This paper is based on my master's research. We started writing it in 2018 (yes, you read that correctly) and through a meandering journey, it has finally made it out into the world! Thank you to Peter Johnson and the reviewers for getting us here.

https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6071

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