Disclaimer, I am a huge fan of OpenStreetMap. For those who are not familiar, the five second version is that OpenStreetMap does to mapping what Wikipedia did to encyclopedias. Imagine Google Maps where each bike path and fence line that someone has taken to the time to map makes its way to your eyeballs and you would have a pretty good idea of what it looks like for some areas of the world. Results may very. Again, this is a similarity it has with Wikipedia.
OpenStreetMap is only part of the story of engaging and provocative map making that can be done today in a matter of minutes. Some of the maps are inherently political while others are more conceptual. As the Atlantic article covers the very idea of maps is changing:
Increasingly, the maps people want to see aren't just literal, but also conceptual. According to Steiner, the role of the cartographer is actually moving away from the notion of accurately representing the world and towards that of creating a symbolic representation of space -- which he means very broadly. "We just saw a great image of a woman's journey through psychoanalytic space," he says. Two points on a graph represented the woman, who was dissatisfied with herself: one plotted her ideal self and the other her actual self when she arrived in therapy. The points were very far apart. Over the course of several therapy sessions they moved closer together, and by the final session had nearly joined together. "That's a map," he says.
OpenStreetMap itself is often stylized to produce less literal results that evoke memories of watercolors or dot-matrix printers. Even the many dogmas of cartography including the little lines that separate the map from the page they are on or the tried and true north arrow are facing all sorts of challenges.
Another example of a wholesale rejection of the rules governing map-making comes from Project Linework which is about making maps that purposefully get the boundary lines wrong. Project Linework proves that people can get the information without the literal extremes. It is this focus on, above all else, the information the map strives to share, that ties these radical cartographers to Ptolomy and all the other geography freaks before them.
Now, I hope I have wooed you with pretty maps and a dazzling story of rebelling cartographers because this has all been a lead up to a call to arms. What OpenStreetMap needs is a less honest brother, a Stephen Colbert to it's John Stewart if you will. As OpenStreetMap is used in humanitarian crises and commercial services it is important that the overarching goal of the project remain that it contains some degree of formal accuracy. What we need is an alternative that is not afraid to lose the truth if in so doing it can contribute to the realm of truthiness.
The goal of this OpenConceptMap should be to put the same easy mapping tools OpenStreetMap used to mark power lines and byways and use them to map the spatial realities that might not show up on a street map. What if people could map out the needs of their community? What if neighbors could draw a map of where they felt was safe? However, the true power of this idea is not in what we can imagine people would do with this tool but rather all the things that no one would ever think of mapping.
We live in a spatial world. Space matters and how people think about space not only impacts the lives of people around the world but also wildlife and conservation. The overarching question is, what would we learn if in addition to letting people map the highways, we allowed people to map whatever it is that maps could be to them? Why not move away from boundary lines and towards the distance between dots for open online collaborative maps?
Post edit: There is an additional article on OpenStreetMap and amateur cartographers posted on Wired.com. Here is a snippet:
Maron also runs the GroundTruth Initiative, which helps NGOs and organizations develop projects and strategy, as well as training them to use tools such as OpenStreetMap. People, especially young people, are very hungry and quick to learn, he says, even if they have little experience with technology or “geographic literacy.”“With Map Kibera — I don’t know if it would be so much the case these days — but we actually had to start off teaching how to rename files and how to use the mouse. Now those guys, just a few years later are some of the best mappers in Kenya.” Many people have never seen a map before, so geographic thinking is introduced through exercises such as getting them to map with their feet, paper map drawing and tracing routes they take frequently using satellite imagery.
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