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<p>Sustaining the participation of contributors is a primary challenge for Open Collaboration (OC) projects, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM). While prior research has quantified the volume and timing of disengagement from OSM, there remains a limited understanding of the day-to-day experiences that may cause individual contributors to leave. In this paper, we argue that the primary activity of participation in OSM is the creation and maintenance of data within the constraints of the community’s mapping conventions. We investigate contributors’ interactions with these conventions to identify the issues they experience that could cause disengagement. Drawing on 84 survey responses and 15 semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate that OSM data is a sociotechnical achievement and that its quality is a derived characteristic of contributors’ continuous learning, interpretation, enactment, and collective negotiation of conventions. We find that these sociotechnical practices serve as the primary socialization mechanism in OSM, transforming newcomers who strictly adhere to conventions to manage their fear of “adding noise to the data” into confident contributors who intentionally “bend the rules” to better suit local context and personal values. We also show how the mechanisms for transparency designed for quality assurance structurally impede participation for newcomers as well as experienced contributors.</p>

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From the fear of “adding noise to the data” to the confidence to “bend the rules”: Contributor interactions with mapping conventions shape participation and data quality in OpenStreetMap

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月22日

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  • Gopinath Gnanakumar Malathi,
  • Graham Dove

摘要

Sustaining the participation of contributors is a primary challenge for Open Collaboration (OC) projects, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM). While prior research has quantified the volume and timing of disengagement from OSM, there remains a limited understanding of the day-to-day experiences that may cause individual contributors to leave. In this paper, we argue that the primary activity of participation in OSM is the creation and maintenance of data within the constraints of the community’s mapping conventions. We investigate contributors’ interactions with these conventions to identify the issues they experience that could cause disengagement. Drawing on 84 survey responses and 15 semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate that OSM data is a sociotechnical achievement and that its quality is a derived characteristic of contributors’ continuous learning, interpretation, enactment, and collective negotiation of conventions. We find that these sociotechnical practices serve as the primary socialization mechanism in OSM, transforming newcomers who strictly adhere to conventions to manage their fear of “adding noise to the data” into confident contributors who intentionally “bend the rules” to better suit local context and personal values. We also show how the mechanisms for transparency designed for quality assurance structurally impede participation for newcomers as well as experienced contributors.