Episode Details

This talk presents a systems perspective analysis of events in October-November 2023 which started with large-scale vandalism of OpenStreetMap data in Israel and ended with the introduction of rate limiting. Noting how the project reacted in face of this unique situation and the undermining of its basic assumptions facilitating the project helps uncover resilience- and vulnerability-inducing mechanisms within it, to characterize the range of possible external influences on the project, and assess their possible outcomes. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is generally considered to be a ‘do-ocracy’ [1], a governing system in which power stems from doing and those who do more (contribute more) have greater ability to influence the project. This does not mean that hierarchy within OSM is entirely bottom-up, as Fast & Rimmer’s systems perspective model of a Volunteered Geographic Information project suggests [2] - it is made of interconnected components (the technical infrastructure, project, and contributors) each providing a different level of direct access to the core of the project. Entities may move between these components, but a certain level of separation still exists, enforced informally or formally by gatekeeping procedures or individual acts. The fuzziness of borders and the interdependence of components open for multiple types of interactions that may translate to major impacts on the nature of the project. In this talk we use communication records from various media (the OSM_Israel Telegram group [3], community forum discussions [4,5], and GitHub issues [6,7]) to: i) to analyse a specific set of events - the politically-motivated edits in Israel and the subsequent introduction of rate limiting in OSM [8] - from a systems perspective; and ii) conceptually explore power dynamics and impacts within collaborative geodata projects and specifically OSM along with their implications for the project’s vulnerability and resilience. The chain of events started on 20 October 2023, when two members of the OSM_Israel Telegram group [3] reported receiving offensive comments on their recent edits. One of them noted that the commenting user was performing edits to the OSM data in Israel that were clearly acts of vandalism, i.e. deleting and distorting data. It was only the day after that the members of the Telegram group realised that these acts were part of a greater effort in which 3 newly registered OSM users were performing large-scale deletions and distortions of data in Israel. The timing of these edits, taking place while the Israel Defense Forces were launching airstrikes over Gaza strip in retaliation of the 7 October attack by Hamas, and their related changeset comments, e.g. “There is no country Israel & Free Palestine”, clearly attested that they were politically-motivated (For a representative example, see [9]). The events were quickly reported to the OSM Foundation’s (OSMF) Data Working Group (DWG), the voluntary body responsible for handling data issues such as copyright infringement and vandalism. The DWG issued bans to involved users, yet these were replaced in the next few days by more new users together making tens of thousands of similar edits. Meanwhile, one user, responding to these acts, further vandaled the map by ‘annexing’ part of the Gaza strip [10]. In the immediate aftermath of these events, most of the OSM data for Tel Aviv was deleted from the map and data all across Israel and the eastern Mediterranean basin, as far as Crete, Cyprus, and Turkey, suffered from distortions (the scripts the vandal accounts were using automatically distorted random objects crossing the area of Israel, including objects such as coastlines that extend beyond these boundaries). Yet the impacts of the events did not end with the DWG reverting the vandal edits. These events had a direct connection with the introduction of a daily rate limit (set individually based on the seniority of the editing user and the number of edited entities, among