Free Labor and DIY Cartography

At the NCA Urban Communication preconference, there was talk about how we are increasingly using technologies to connect to our physical world. There was the usual back and forth about the promise and failure of technology. What strikes me is that despite the digital divide, there are many people who are working for free to make the web more relevant to everyone. Even if you don't use digital maps, mobile technologies or any other digital tools, there is a base that is being built by the people who do use the stuff. One of the presenters countered that such "free labor" is a problem because it cheats people out of getting paid. I can see his point, I do get the dystopian aspects of it - that we are all just contributing to some massive surveillance project - the global panopticon.

But I can't help but think that it's very cool that people are contributing creativity and work to a project that is really global. There is all this data that is currently being gathered and uploaded for free through Google Maps, Flickr, LibraryThing, Delicious, etc. This is making the Internet ever so much more relevant and useful for others who might get on it later. Collective, creative documenting, archiving, organizing, annotating. This is why we started the www.urbanarchives.org, which is increasingly dwarfed by all of the social media resources that are being built by masses of people instead of just the three of us and a handful of students. Still it is a drop in the collective pool of data.

So, today there was this article in the NYT about people creating maps. It linked to my Urban Com argument about people providing free labor (via data) to make maps more useful for everyone. The article quotes one such gatherer, who explains why he creates maps:

"Mr. Hintz said these acts of geo-volunteerism were motivated in part by self-interest: he wants to know where he's going. But 'it has this added attraction that it helps others,' he said."

I sent this to the UrbanCom list and Daniel Makagon sent me links to Mark Neumann's project http://hearingplaces.org/ that maps sounds from various cities throughout the US. Daniel and a student started a similar project of mapping the sounds of Chicago. They are using this map as a starting point. Cool.