Can a Crowd Get Me From A to B?
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 by Patrick Ross“Maps are expensive and proprietary,” an advocate of wisdom of the crowds told a Washington Post reporter recently. “They should be free.”
As an amateur student of the history of cartography — don’t get me started on the Dutch Golden Age of the Seventeenth Century, I still will not have shut up after ten hours of speaking — I can tell you there is a good reason why maps are not free. Like any endeavor of value, including the creation of The Washington Post, making a high-quality map requires manpower, know-how and technology.
The Post story documented some Digital Utopians who want to create the world’s best global map, an open-source project called OpenStreetMap. An army of unpaid enthusiasts are running around their communities, noting the location of lamp posts and sewer drains. This is great. I feel confident that if I’m ever in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Berkeley, California, I’ll be able to fire up my BlackBerry and find the nearest public park bench in a flash. Rand McNally can’t tell me that.
Of course this concept isn’t new. When wi-fi was still known only to techie geeks, I somehow also knew about it and used it frequently when covering events as a reporter. Wi-fi at the time was hardly ubiquitous. Loads of volunteers, when they would discover a wi-fi node, would upload that information to web sites to help the next traveler. Of course, this too wasn’t new. I wrote an article about this phenomenon at the time, and compared it to hobo signs. As a modest contributor to one of those wi-fi collection web sites, I liked feeling I was helping a stranger somewhere better connect to the new wireless world.
The problem arises when people do not see that movements such as these excel in parallel to commercial and proprietary enterprises; they cannot work as a replacement for a commercial and proprietary model.
Creative Commons is great for artists and creators who wish to give away some of their rights, and for potential users of works who aren’t wedded to having to use for a particular work to re-purpose. But Creative Commons is not a model designed to replace our existing copyright model; in fact, it itself is based on copyright law.
Open source software is great for programmers who want to be part of something larger than themselves, and for techies who don’t want to pay for software and who are comfortable installing and modifying software not designed for dummies. But open source software is not a model designed to replace our existing copyright model; in fact, it itself is based on copyright law.
Of course, these would-be cartographers are not building maps from scratch. They are not going out with survey equipment and measuring roads and streams. They are not conducting topographical surveys of altitude and terrain. They are not doing these things any more than the wi-fi site I participated in was mapping for the first time the street addresses where these wi-fi nodes could be found.
The crowd here is providing particular add-ons to existing cartographic efforts, efforts that involved extensive labor, fact-checking (cartographers don’t print their best estimate and then wait for the wisdom of the crowds to correct the fact that a road was in fact a canal) and use of expensive technology such as the purchase of satellite data.
Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget notes that Linux was not conceived from thin air but was built on top of Unix. He feels the “hive” (as he calls it) can produce services and goods of value, but is hostile to the philosophy that it can replace the work of dedicated and informed individuals. He is a source worth listening to, as a pioneer in software (particularly virtual reality) and a musician and composer.
Here are three reasons why we should not expect open-source mapping to replace the need for cartographers:
1. Actual wisdom. Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say you could put a survey on every seat at next Sunday’s SuperBowl. Ask each to estimate how many dimensions there are in our universe, and describe the nature of each. It’s possible that out of the 75,000 attendees, one-tenth of one percent are current on the latest theories of quantum mechanics. That’s still 75 knowledgeable individuals, a pretty impressive bunch. But let’s say the answers of all 75,000 people were put into the database. Do the answers of the other 74,925 people contribute to the accuracy of the answer? In all likelihood, they not only do not contribute, they detract from it, making it harder for those 75 to be heard.
It’s all fine and dandy for an amateur to count benches; even if that Berkeley student is off by a little bit I’ll still find a place to sit. But the expertise and accuracy for formal cartography cannot be assumed to emerge from any given crowd, particularly when there is no incentive for compensation for their acquired skill and knowledge.
2. Geographic spread. For those readers who only know of the 1980s by watching videos of old big-hair bands on web sites, you might be interested to know that there was a lot of focus on charitable efforts in that decade. For some reason, though, scale was important to organizers of charitable efforts. You couldn’t just do a fund-raiser, you had to do something on an unprecedented scale. That gave us “We Are the World” * (being remade for Haiti) “Band-Aid” and “Live Aid,” and “Farm Aid.” It also gave us something called “Hands Across America.”
It seemed a good idea at the time to help homeless people by having Americans form a single hand-holding line across the United States. Actual homeless people probably would have preferred each of those individuals spend a day volunteering at a soup kitchen. But as an idealistic college student, I thought this would be a great thing. I was at home in Phoenix with my parents as the big day approached, and I mailed in a form to participate (yes, sign-ups were done by post, sorry Internet-heads, it was 1986). I was assigned a spot — an unpopulated stretch of interstate highway in northern Arizona. My mother supported the idea of the event but not the idea of her only child driving off to who-knows-where to participate. I tried to get the organizers to give me a spot in Phoenix, where the line was bisecting and where I was, but no dice, so I didn’t participate. It was just as well. That stretch of northern Arizona highway was one of the many areas where there were huge gaps in the line.
One lesson to take from this — however interesting this idea was, they simply couldn’t get it to scale. The same applies to mapping the world. I anticipate a high level of detail about Cambridge and Berkeley; will we get the same level of detail at a highway marker ten miles outside of Winslow, Arizona? **
3. Sustainability. As far as I know, “Hands Across America” was only attempted once. Let’s say they had actually managed to create that human chain all the way across the country. Could they have gotten us all back in 1987? 1990? 2005? Can you survey SuperBowl attendees on quantum mechanics every single year?
One of the reasons maps are expensive is that the world doesn’t sit still. It is constantly changing. Any map, anywhere, is out of date the moment it is set in fixed form. Cartographers accept that, and it’s actually not a bad thing because it keeps them employed.
Let’s say some enterprising Berkeley student marks every public bench in town. Will that information be accurate in five years? Ten? Twenty? Can we assume that in two decades there will still be an army of volunteers who care if I can easily locate a place to sit down and call my wife?
There’s been some evidence in the last year that the enthusiasm for voluntarily contributing to Wikipedia has waned. Reasons are given for fewer people contributing — more top-level control by the foundation that runs it, a dearth of “new” topics to explore, acrimony between contributors. But one reason has to be that, at some point, some contributors stopped and realized they were dedicating hundreds of hours of their time to an effort without compensation or direct benefit. Might they want to spend that time enjoying the outdoors, visiting friends, or trying to find a date? At least worker bees are given food and shelter in the hive, and a few lucky ones are able to get busy with the queen.
So what does this leave us? Open-source mapmaking can’t exist without professional maps to build on. We can’t assume accuracy will emerge from the collective, an important point given the fact that accuracy is a bit more important in a map then in, say, a Wikipedia entry on the latest “Family Guy” episode. The vast size of our world suggests there will be not be an even spread of volunteers across its surface. And a lack of motivation beyond altruism will likely mean the material posted, even if accurate at the time of posting, will not be kept accurate in the long run.
Repeat after me: Products of crowd-sourcing can be of benefit in certain circumstances on a certain scale, but it has yet to be demonstrated that any crowd-sourcing project can replace in full the effort of a few highly-trained, creative and properly motivated individuals.
Notes:
* As the student leader of my high school choir I was expected to sing a solo at my high school graduation. My choir teacher and I were feuding, however, so to stick it to me she assigned me Michael Jackson’s solo in “We Are the World.” As a baritone that was a challenging part, but I embraced it. At graduation, on the stage in front of 3,000 people, I stepped up to the microphone, donned sunglasses and one sequined glove, and sang in the most obnoxious falsetto imaginable. The crowd roared, many told me afterward it was the only entertaining part of the ceremony, but my choir teacher was livid. She wrote a letter to my soon-to-be college insisting they revoke my acceptance. That didn’t happen, but three years later I began working for that college’s admissions office as a student interviewer. The associate dean told me she remembered that letter. The whole staff at the time got a good laugh out of it, and felt it validated their choice of admitting me. It’s possible that letter actually helped me get that admissions job, which was vital because I was broke, and the money I earned there was enough to help me drive across the country to D.C. after college graduation and find my first job here. That was twenty years ago, so for those readers who wish I wasn’t doing what I was doing, I guess you can blame that high school choir director in 1985.
** Even though, as the Eagles sing, some of the women there are such a fine sight to see.
