Co-designing data visualisations with grassroots

The project

This project promotes digital equity by empowering members from under-represented communities to co-produce data visualisations as a method to examine and challenge the impact of neutrality as a guiding principle in a particular and relevant case of digital good: OpenStreetMap [OSM].

OSM is the largest and more successful collaborative map of the world. Like Wikipedia, it is based on principles of participation, openness, and neutrality to “map the world as it exists” [1]. To that end, more than 10 million volunteers from different geographies and backgrounds contribute with their local knowledge to add new map features or improve existing ones. Its data, covering the entire globe, is so exhaustive and precise that it complements official data sources and populates thousands of tools and popular services. Moreover, the UN-backed Digital Public Good Alliance recognised in February 2024 OSM as a global Digital Public Good.

Enquiring about the world-views embedded in such a crucial project and their mechanisms to avoid inequities against vulnerable communities is critical to understand the values that it produces and reproduces. This is especially relevant in the case of OSM for two reasons. First, because maps shape reality as much as they are shaped by it, for example by influencing the perception of the world, exerting political power and control or affecting mobility, accessibility and consumption patterns, among others. Second, because OSM’s community is estimated to be highly biased towards specific and hegemonic demographics, where white men from Europe and the US are overrepresented.

Our interdisciplinary research draws from critical geography and feminism to investigate how neutrality can be applied to either support or hinder equity. To achieve this, we are teaming up with Geochicas, a community-led organisation from Latin America whose mission is to close the gender gap in the OSM community. Together, we are implementing a transformative participatory process aimed at co-designing data visualisations.

Methods: Data visualisations and Co-design

For us, data visualisations are not just an output to communicate findings, but a research method used to mediate and provoke ideas, discussions, and reactions that arise from thinking with and about data and its representation, while producing and exploring the data and designing a visualisation. Conversely, we understand participation and co-design as a way to consider the particularities of data, tasks, users, context of use and world-views of the participants, which is a condition for creating visualisations which are actually capable of being transformative.

On the other hand, co-design, is a method to work with and for under-represented communities to acknowledge their lived experiences while producing a transformative research. This is, a research that produces changes to surface how minoritised demographics are involved, recognised, or excluded from data production and decision-making.

The results

While the project is still under development, we have started developing an interactive dashboard showing how different groups of users contribute to OSM, with an emphasis on equity and privacy standpoint, and visualisations aimed at understanding the decision-making processes.

The dashboard is released as Free/Libre OpenSource Software, and the source code and documentation can be found in this repository: https://github.com/WarwickCIM/OSMdashboard