In its early days, the geodata and mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM) was widely celebrated for opening up and “democratizing” the production of geographic knowledge. However, critical research highlights that the new socio-technical practices of collaborative mapping often also produce or reproduce patterns of exclusion, not least in the area of relative data density between the Global South and North. These findings notwithstanding, we consider it important to acknowledge the increasing number of contributions of geodata from regions outside the old European core of OSM. This expansion of geodata production in OSM is related to a diversification of OSM actors and socio-technical practices. While OSM has often been described as a crowd-based project bringing together thousands of individual craft mappers, our analysis of OSM metadata indicates new institutional actors are gaining relevance. These developments have not only resulted in new collaborations but also conflicts between local mapping communities and institutional actors. We interpret these processes in two ways. First, the expansion of mapping activities can be viewed as a decolonizing process, whereby quantitative differences in data density between the Global North and South are partly reduced and new groups of local mappers are empowered to produce geographic knowledge. Second, these new developments can also be understood as colonizing processes. The engagement of large commercial actors in OSM raises concerns that the project (and its local mappers) could be used as a new means of data extraction and that in particular new and diverse voices in the OSM community are marginalized by a fixation on economically exploitable, modernistic and universalistic epistemologies. However, this supposedly clear distinction should not obscure the fact that colonizing and decolonizing processes intertwine in complex ways.

Crowd-based knowledge has often been welcomed as an opening, democratization and decommodification of knowledge production. Such a self-description has been widely criticized in research over the past decade an neglecting the political economy and the social exclusion reproduced in these forms of geodata. This paper looks at the growing role of institutionalized actors in the production of geospatial data in OpenStreetMap (OSM). Especially in urban contexts, it can be observed that commercial platforms have started to both use but also to contribute data from and to OSM, so that its geodata has become an integral resource of their platforms. Critical research on platform economies highlights a flexibilisation, acceleration and outsourcing of risks as key modes of those models. The crowd-based productions of geo-data is a perfect case in point. This paper discusses the extent to which platforms are integrating the crowd-based knowledge of OSM into structures of a neoliberal data colonialism.

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