Mapping Community Engagement with Urban Crowd-Sourcing

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 6

Volume

Vol. 6 No. 5 (2012): ICWSM Workshop Technical Report WS-12-04 (When the City Meets the Citizen)

When the City Meets the Citizen

Cities are highly dynamic entities, with urban elements such as businesses, cultural and social Points-of- Interests (POIs), housing, transportation and the like, continuously changing. In order to maintain accurate spatial information in these settings, crowd-sourcing models of data collection, such as in OpenStreetMap (OSM), have come under investigation. Like many crowd-sourcing platforms (e.g., Wikipedia), these geo- wikis exhibit tailing-off activity, bringing into ques- tion their long-term viability. In this paper, we begin an investigation into the sustainability of urban crowd-sourcing, by studying the network structure and ge- ographical mapping of implicit communities of con- tributors in OSM. We observe that spatially clustered crowd-sourcing communities produce higher coverage than those with looser geographic affinity. We discuss the positive implications that this has on the future of urban crowd-sourcing.

10.1609/icwsm.v6i5.14216