Parasite Users? Users and Cycling Infrastructures in OpenStreetMap

Much ink has been spilt on the crucial role of users in innovation processes. Within STS, fascinating studies have shown how users played an important role in stabilizing technical objects, describing processes of co-configuration by which collectives of users and technologies mutually shaped one another, and the inscription of frameworks of action in technical objects. Studying the inventory of cycling infrastructures in French OpenStreetMap, we show that volunteer cartographers’ categorical work is also subject to these kinds of processes: users are constantly discussed in online debates. But they are present in a very particular way. In most cases, users are treated as entities to be underplayed as much as possible. It would appear that in order to create a neat, clean database that responds to the criteria of coherence necessary to bring it to a point of stabilization, choices made for the sake of users should be avoided.

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