Volunteered Geographic Information: the nature and motivation of produsers

Advances in positioning, Web mapping, cellular communications and wiki technologies have outpaced the original visions of GSDI programs around the world. By tapping the distributed knowledge, personal time and energy of volunteer contributors, GI voluntarism is beginning to relocate and redistribute selected GI productive activities from mapping agencies to networks of non-state volunteer actors. Participants in the production process are both users and producers, or ‘produsers’ to use a recent neologism. Indeed, GI voluntarism ultimately has the potential to redistribute the rights to define and judge the value of the produced geographic information and of the new production system in general. The concept and its implementation presents a rich collection of both opportunities and risks now being considered by leaders of public and private mapping organizations world-wide. In this paper, the authors describe and classify both the types of people who volunteer geospatial information and the nature of their contributions. Combining empirical research dealing with the Open Source software and Wikipedia communities with input from selected national mapping agencies and private companies, the authors propose a taxonomy of voluntary geospatial information contributors. Differentiating between three different contexts in which these volunteer contributors operate – market-driven, social networking, and civic/governmental – the authors describe key opportunities, constraints and factors to consider in each case when determining whether and how to assess information provided by such sources.