From Missingness to Motivation: A “Living Dataset” Perspective on Volunteering Geographic Information

Abstract. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most popular, and arguably most successful, volunteered geographic information (VGI) project. The scale of OSM’s goal of mapping the world through individual contributions necessitates a long development time, while the ever-changing nature of the real landscape precludes the possibility of ever “completing” the map. Thus, OSM is a living dataset. With this perspective in mind, we reexamine the motivations for contributing to OSM and the outputs of those motivations. Whereas a pathway from motivation to mapping may explain any individual contributor’s experience, we argue the whole OSM project represents a more complex system in which biased and missing data can be both a driver and a consequence of the VGI model of collaboration. We also reflect on the ways in which the exogenous shock of the proliferation of generative and geoAI may disrupt this system.