Mapping Community Engagement with Urban Crowd-Sourcing

This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and geo-spatial mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM). The authors initiate an investigation into the sustainability of urban crowdsourcing, by studying the network structure and geographical mapping of implicit communities of contributors in OSM. They observe that spatially clustered crowd-sourcing communities produce higher coverage than those with looser geographic affinity, and discuss the positive implications that this can have on the future of urban crowdsourcing.

This article will be of use to PVE researchers and practitioners interested in urban crowd-sourced information in OpenStreetMap and other applications that include geographic mapping and communities. The authors argue that urban entities are highly dynamic and rich environments for crowdsourcing models of data collection, but note that the long-term viability of these collections has increasingly come under investigation. Their article addresses these sustainability issues and presents informative and useful findings.