I thought I would use the user diary as a means of introducing myself and my research activities. I am a Research Fellow in the Nottingham Geospatial Institute at the University of Nottingham interested in participation biases in geospatial crowdsourced projects such as OSM and other Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects. I am also interested more broadly in biases in citizen science. My current research project is concerned with the way in which participation biases in OSM may potentially affect the usability of the data that is collected and subsequently what is available to location based service providers which use OSM as their primary geographical database.

It is my belief that a better understanding of participation biases in VGI can give us improved potential to contribute to the future sustainable planning of our urban environments and improve services in rural communities.

Having said this, my diary entry here is also an opportunity to set the scene for those of you who may be interested in getting involved in this work through participating in a survey which I will soon be publishing online.

My proposed survey will be aimed at collecting some brief demographic information about the OSM contributors who respond. I then intend to perform an analysis of the OSM database to try to identify differences between the activities and contributing behaviours of male and female contributors to OSM. This is of major interest to me. I hope that the results will enable me to make some important conclusions and observations about current VGI contribution practices and make useful and meaningful recommendations back to the OSM community and other crowdsourced data stakeholders around gender issues in participation. A key part of the dissemination of my research results will be making the outcomes of the work available to the OSM community via my OSM diary, the mailing list and hopefully an open-access journal paper.

I am hoping that many of you will be interested in the study, sufficiently so to take part! I am interested in the activities and behaviours of both male and female contributors and would encourage as many users as possible to participate. Identifying patterns of activity in the OSM database, based on which type of users contribute which type of information, could work to consider how to improve gender specific participation.

As soon as the survey is available I will publish it here as well as disseminate it through the OSM mailing system.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact me through the OSM messaging system if you wish to learn more about the survey or research project in general. Thank you for reading this far and I will post again with a link to the survey when it is open.