Composition is also Coordination: Multi-Actor Digital Mapping in Madrid

Juan Forero

Abstract

The analysis of web-based mapping has usually focused on the relation between a specific type of social actor and their engagement with the map that is being created. Through an ethnographic description of two participatory mapping projects in Madrid, Spain, this article explores other practices that are indirectly related to map production. Drawing on the analytical distinction between composition and coordination suggested by Chris Kelty, the article argues that the relationships built between various actors involved in the projects (coordination) are as important to consider as the relationship between a single type of actor and the map (composition), for the tensions between efficiency versus ethics, or technical versus managerial knowledge emerge in the multi-actor negotiations and decisions taking place. 

Introduction

Consider the maps that are represented in the images above. They are all part of a long-term mapping project in Madrid called Los Madriles,[1] which aims to serve as a visibility platform for the community-led initiatives that are transforming the city – both infrastructurally and socially. Even though they all represent the same city and the grassroots or participatory projects made by citizens there, the maps are thematic: one shows projects that reuse and recycle materials to make the city more accessible, another one visualizes initiatives fighting to reduce inequality and defend citizen rights, and a last one represents the citizen initiatives that are trying to make the city more inclusive for children.[2] On top of that, Los Madriles website links the project with another one on its homepage (see image below). They state that ‘the digital map of Los Madriles is integrated to CIVICS,[3] a collaborative platform where you will be able to find, add and filter neighbourhood initiatives from 34 cities in Ibero-America.’

It could be said that they are all different instances or versions of the same map. But why did the authors of the map want it to have specific versions for specific purposes, and how do they manage to do so?

This article aims to tackle the above questions through an ethnography of Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas (henceforth VIC), one of the groups involved in the creation of both Los Madriles and CIVICS, and their work relations with other actors such as funding institutions, web developers, counterculture collectives, and grassroots communities in Spain and other countries of Latin America. VIC is a collective of Spanish architects, based in Madrid, that work with citizen participation projects -from social innovation labs to the co-creation of artistic/architectural spaces in the city. However, since the 2008 economic crisis they have also been developing Los Madriles and CIVICS using participatory methods -workshops in which citizens and community leaders were taught to geo-reference what VIC terms citizen initiatives in their neighbourhoods (i.e., neighbourhood greenhouses, self-managed libraries, or community centres)- and transforming the outcomes of these workshops into aesthetically and functionally appealing digital maps.

I spent six weeks with VIC doing participant observation in their office in central Madrid, between May and June 2017, for my master’s degree in Digital Anthropology at UCL. I was first assigned as a sort of ‘intern’ for one of Los Madriles specific maps -in this case, it was a map of Usera, a neighbourhood in southern Madrid. In this role, I was able to attend the mapping workshops and see how VIC members interacted with the citizens and grassroots organisations that took part in them. Furthermore, I also had the chance to be at their office ‘uploading’ the data collected during the workshops into Excel Spreadsheets and describe how they organised and understood that information. Eventually I was also able to follow some of VIC’s members into meetings with funders and fellow collectives, video calls with web developers, and talks at cultural centres and other spaces. I had the chance, then, to talk to other actors involved in the mapping process and witness how their points of view during the discussions with VIC affected the way the map was made. 

It was precisely through this embedded experience that I arrived at the argument of this article: I suggest that besides the practices of engagement with the map and the tools that are involved in its creation, it is important to take into account the frictions, negotiations, aims, and trajectories of the multiple people (and institutions) that design, manage, produce, and change the map, for it explains how a map is a social object with its own ‘cultural life.’[4] As the following sections will show, aspects of a map such as its specific aesthetics and potentials of accessibility make sense when we focus more on the context in which the map is created -a context, I suggest, which is full of individuals and institutions negotiating and collaborating with each other through the production of the map.

The article starts by setting out the context of VIC and their map-making collaborators. The second section will show the way VIC members deal with the tension between two different types of relationships that they need to manage in the map-making process: one with the grassroots organisations that participate in the making of the map, and the other one with the funders that demand results and the map as a final product. The third section will focus on the relationship VIC builds with other mapping collectives through aesthetic differences in the map, and the last section will show the way VIC members apply their disciplinary knowledge in architecture and urbanism to work with the web developers that code CIVICS.

Context: Mapping with different types of actors

Even though the methodology of the participatory mapping workshops developed by VIC changed from project to project, most of the time it consisted of providing a ‘blank map’ -only the shapes of the streets and neighbourhoods, no names or descriptions- either printed or in a digital format. The next step was to present the workshop participants with a series of possible categories through which they could label all the grassroots projects operating in their neighbourhood that they can remember. Those categories were represented by location icons (like the one used by Google Maps) with different colours and shapes, so the end product was the ‘blank map’ populated with colourful icons (chosen and located by the participants) that categorized and represented grassroots projects impacting the city. After the workshop, those icons were then translated into a Spreadsheet database, using Microsoft Excel, where the geolocation coordinates were added, and then the database was sent to a web developer so that it can be added to CIVICS -built on OpenStreetMap (see Figure 3).

As already evident in the description of their mapping workshops, VIC members needed to work not only with the citizens and grassroots projects but also with web developers. However, the network of collaborators and project partners expanded beyond that. Since the 2008 economic crisis in Spain, VIC was part of a larger trend of groups, institutions, and individuals that worked on collaborative, cooperative, or participatory projects. In Spain, the 15M, also known as the Indignados movement, was the ‘framework’ that assembled several trends of social action such as communitarianism, feminism, alternative media, techno-libertarianism, open urbanism, counterculture, and deliberative democracy, among many others.[5] 15M was the entry-point and the beginning of a wide-scale transformation towards political experimentation,[6] grassroots infrastructural appropriation,[7] and citizen participation in Spain,[8] but particularly in Madrid and Barcelona. VIC was an active member of several projects that arose from 15M onwards. This meant working with, and relating to, a varied set of actors such as artists, social scientists, designers, architects, political activists, and cultural management professionals that made part of several grassroots and counterculture collectives. For instance, since 2009 VIC had developed Los Madriles, an ‘atlas of neighbourhood initiatives’ in Madrid, along with other Madrid-based collectives of urbanists such as Zuloark and Todo Por La Praxis,[9] as well as neighbourhood associations such as FRAVM.[10]

Nonetheless, the 15M movement did not only impact grassroots or community processes. Part of the movement was directed towards using the force of grassroots and deliberative actions back into representative democracy, generating ‘movement-political parties’ [11] such as Partido X and Podemos.[12] It meant that the network of heterogeneous actors interested in deploying citizen participation (including participatory mapping) was not only limited to on-the-ground actors, but also professionals and community leaders that ended up occupying government positions that allowed them to direct public resources towards the funding of those participatory projects. Therefore, a new set of actors -government and funding institutions- started to impact the ecosystem of participation in Madrid through the injection of public or private capital for project execution, which produced a market or ‘industry’ of professionals and organizations capable of crafting participation.[13] All of the projects I was able to observe during my time in the field were funded by different public institutions such as the European Union, Madrid’s Town Hall, Intermediae Matadero, Zaragoza’s Town Hall, Casa Encendida Cultural Centre, and the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), among others. Those institutions were mostly treated as clients, so VIC members needed to deliver presentations, reports, documents, budgets, and proposals besides the maps as a final product.

Thus, developing a project of participatory mapping in Madrid involves many more actors than simply the map and the grassroots organizations that participate in the mapping workshops. However, little has been said in the literature about this sort of situated relationships and how they impact the production of a map. Despite the growing interest in understanding how web-based maps have allowed the inclusion of diverse non-cartographers into cartographic practices,[14] studies exploring the multiplicity of actors and their form of engagement with a geo-web app or digital map is recent.[15] And what is more, these studies usually focus on generic types of actors and leave behind when, where and how negotiations, collaborations or overlaps between situated actors happen.[16]

For that reason, in this article I use the distinction proposed by anthropologist Chris Kelty [17] between composition and coordination in collaborative digital practices. Kelty argues that composition involves the arrangements between digital media and the epistemic practices that emerge from there. Coordination, however, is ‘the media-specific material and technical choices that allow a group of people to work together on similar topics’.[18] Therefore, to compose a digital map, we need to understand how social actors coordinate themselves through the specific and contingent uses of media, tools, apps, platforms, or other devices. I argue that the processes of coordination are as important as practices of composition. And this, in turn, matters because it helps to understand how the ‘cultural life of maps’ is inhabited by contradictions: there is not an either/or relation between participatory and commercial map-making practices, nor between authoritarian and libertarian intentions of the map-makers. Rather, it is a tense relation between all these apparent contradictions that only make sense when the map-making process is seen in the context of multi-actor work.

In the following sections I will use ethnographic descriptions to highlight the ways in which situated practices, discourses, vernacular understandings, objects, protocols, and materials interact to generate a multi-author digital map that is both a product for funding institutions, a device that differentiates the aesthetic work of different collectives, and an activist effort to give voice to ignored initiatives in the city.

Efficiency with funders, ethics with communities

Science and technology studies (STS) have shown the way in which maps are one of the modern mechanisms through which governmentality is achieved. It involves a process of simplification and abstraction of the territory and its inhabitants [19] so that ‘objective’ knowledge can be created and moved.[20] This is achieved through the capacity of an expert (in this case, a professional cartographer) to enact a position of authority.[21] For VIC members those critical ideas were nothing new, as they were aware of this authority-effect of making a map and they wanted to distance themselves from it. Esaú, one of VIC members, used the term ‘middle-out’ to explain their effort to counter expert authority: ‘the middle-out means to put in the same table the expert and the non-expert, whereby there is no difference. (...) It is an egalitarian table, and we have dialogue there and relations are established.’ VIC members were consciously trying to reduce their authority in the dialogue with grassroots and citizens, by highlighting the importance of ‘giving voice’ (and visibility) to them in the map-making project.

However, they also accepted that the maps they produced were still a reduction of the bottom-up city-making processes they were trying to depict as Esaú explained to me later, ‘some data get lost in the process of fabricating the physical map, for the map acts as a summary or a communicative element.’ The map is a communicative element in two senses: a way to make the invisible (grassroots) visible as an ethical commitment, but also a way to make the map a product that they can deliver to the funding institutions and stakeholders of the project -the diversity of citizen or grassroots interventions all over Madrid simplified and reduced in a map. During my fieldwork, VIC members (especially Esaú) had regular meetings with Diego and Fernanda, managers from the funding institution that was sponsoring CIVICS. Apart from an eventual discussion about budgets or logistics of the mapping workshops, Diego and Fernanda were highly engaged in the map as such: they frequently commented, criticised, or suggested aspects such as colour palettes (see the section below) or the usability and intuitiveness of the tools that the platform had. Thus, VIC members needed to respond and adapt the funder’s imperatives into the map. VIC was making the map by being situated in a grey area between project management goals, and an ethical/activist drive of inclusion and horizontal dialogue. 

The tension between delivering efficient results, and generating a participatory and voice-giving process, was evident for me in the way they organized and uploaded the data into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet after the mapping workshops. As I was eager to observe (and learn) how they generated spatial data, Esaú (the project leader) assigned Cantoral (a team member) to teach me how to get the data of Usera -a neighbourhood of south Madrid- for Los Madriles map. VIC specifically wanted to upload the names and categories of each of the projects mapped by the participants at the workshops into Excel spreadsheets. The categories, as I described above, were represented graphically by colourful and specifically shaped location points, printed in stickers and chosen by participants (see Figure 4). Each colour, and each shape, represented a specific category (for example, a red point represented the “collaborative economy” category).

However, translating the categories on the map into the spreadsheet was more problematic than I first thought, as the task consisted of comparing the colour of the sticker in the workshop map (printed on a wall of the office) with the colour of a sample sticker that they gave me. As both were printed in different printers, the colours did not easily match, so it was difficult to know what colours the participants were referring to. For me, this meant that I could not distinguish between the participant’s categories and my own interpretations, as their categories needed to pass through my subjective decision in the process of passing data into a spreadsheet -was I talking about them, or were the participants talking about themselves? However, for Cantoral, it was not a problem. When I told him about my concerns, he laughed. I was wasting time with those ethical dilemmas when this part of the process was merely technical. The mapped projects would have an opportunity to confirm they were indeed categorized correctly, as Esaú was going to email the spreadsheet to them after the uploading process finished. In other words, it was not an either/or ethics versus efficiency issue. Rather, it was a matter of organizing their processes differently (see Figure 5) -one stage is ethical (the workshops), another stage is technical (uploading the data), and the process finishes with another ethical step (emailing the data so that they can authorize the representation). Thus, organisational knowledge was key to fulfil both managerial and participatory goals, and the process included practices and objects that are not directly related to making the map but that are crucial to understanding the process of map-making.

Aesthetic boundaries with other mapping collectives

In the same way ‘the geoweb’ has allowed the entry of new social actors and their own logics and dynamics into map-making practices and processes, such as web developers [22] or NGOs,[23] VIC members also made maps through knowledge and practices obtained previously through their work as architects. Specifically, their disciplinary experience found expression in the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic evaluations in their work -that is, constantly valuing all sorts of documents, diagrams, and mock-ups in terms of how beautiful they were and how that specific form evoked specific meanings to them. In Miguel’s (another VIC member) words, ‘each group brings their own communication channel, and we as architects are interested in the artistic and the aesthetic.’ Mauro also used this idea when I interviewed him: ‘visualizations are tools that allow proximity to the social in almost a touchable way. Thinkers do it with words, we do it with graphics.’ In terms of maps, Esaú used the following analogy to show how aesthetics are important to make a map into something inclusive:

If I go to a self-managed plaza that neighbours intervened in and built, but it looks like Apple’s Campus, totally designed and technological, it won’t work for me. Why? Because it is communicating codes -you can’t touch this or that- and those codes will mean that people won’t understand the space as theirs. But if I go to that space and I see self-construction, and I see that I can modify and add materials, that space is communicating that it is yours. It is a difficult balance between aesthetics and function that we have to work with.

Communicating codes through their collaborative map meant arranging the elements in patterns involving form and sequence: colours, space between the elements, sizes, shapes, and so on. For example, CIVICS -the digital platform of grassroots projects in Ibero-America- is composed of several ‘base map’ layers that the user can switch. One of them is a ‘toner’ base map, that is, a high-contrast background (in this case, black and white). For VIC members, the toner base map communicates that the map is inclusive, as the contrasting palette of colours makes it possible for colour-blind persons to use it. Thus, apart from making citizen initiatives visible, VIC also intended to communicate the dynamics of inclusion through aesthetic arrangements so that users could also participate -by exploring and even potentially contacting the mapped initiatives, or even mapping their own grassroots project on the map.

Nonetheless, aesthetics was also at the centre of the tension between the map as a participatory device, and a proprietary or ‘branded’ product. There was tension because a secondary aim of making a map such as CIVICS was that people could appropriate the information and use it as they wished -in other words, VIC designed the platform with a button that allowed the user to download the whole database of the platform if desired. However, those appropriations (which bring about empowerment of grassroots projects to keep mapping themselves) needed to be distinguished from simply ‘copying’ or replicating the map as such. Esaú explained it in the following terms: 

Sometimes people call us and say: ‘hey, can we have the repository of the whole project?’ And we reply: ‘yes, sure! Here is the link, just download it. Of course, you can’t just put the same name in your map [CIVICS], please change the colours and name it differently’. 

Besides the name, then, the colour palette of the map helps to both generate inclusion and active participation, but it also ‘brands’ the project and makes it something that cannot be shared. The colours and other aesthetic aspects of the maps are also related to the collaborative relationship with fellow collectives working on the project. For example, the colour palette of Los Madriles was decided when the project first started by a group of designers from another collective, and that same colour palette needed to be replicated in the following maps (at least as a directive or a point of reference) because it was an imperative set by the funding institution. Even more, both Los Madriles and CIVICS shared the same database, as a mapping workshop of one project also fed the database of the other, because in that way there was more information to be shared with the users of both maps. However, the way to distinguish between both projects funded by -and executed with- different organizations, was to ‘brand’ them through different colours, shapes, fonts, and other aspects of style and aesthetics. ‘Branding’ a map was a way to inscribe the authorship of the different collectives and organisations involved in the making of the map, setting up aesthetic boundaries between different authors at the same time as fostering new users to participate in the mapping process.

Web developers and technical knowledge

The arrival of Geoweb technologies has material implications for map making practices. It involves a computational logic of calculation and organisation through a database.[24] It means, then, that crafting a geoweb-based platform such as CIVICSneeded three types of knowledge: spatial, computational, and organisational.[25] VIC members technically lacked the first two -they were neither trained as professional cartographers, nor they were experts in relational databases (SQL) or coding languages in general. However, VIC members did not see that as a problem: they adapted the software and tools they were already using in their architecture/project management previous work to digitize and organize the spatial data gathered at the participatory workshops, and then send the database to web developers -which oversaw translating the data into a SQL database and connect it to the front-end of CIVICS.

Aylin, a team member of VIC, explained to me once why they were able to work with digital maps without the direct supervision of a cartographer: ‘people think that because we are architects, we don’t know how to use maps. We use them all the time in AutoCAD when we are building a project involving urbanism.’ It might not be the same corpus of knowledge as professional cartographers, but Aylin was still highlighting a close relation with maps as a device that could be used in their own disciplinary terms. A similar situation happened with databases. VIC members were not trained in SQL or Database Management Systems, but instead, they relied on Microsoft Excel, a tool widely used in project management -which was one of their tasks regarding funding institutions. Even though Excel is a ‘flat’ database instead of a relational one, which means it lacks data integrity and the capacity to centralize data in a single place,[26] MS Excel is nonetheless intuitive and user-friendly due to its already wide use in society. Therefore, VIC members used their familiarity with the tool to take the data from its unstructured shape at the mapping workshops, into structured datasets ready for SQL translation by web developers.

Once the database was filled and completed, VIC’s mapping team sent the database to web developers (hired as freelancers), whose job was to create SQL databases, with the information provided by VIC’s Excel spreadsheets, to incorporate them into the digital mapping platform (CIVICS), and to visualize the cartographic data in the way VIC members wanted. However, the data transference process was not strictly unilateral, as web developers also made suggestions about the way data should be presented in a cartographic way. This was the case with the query filter functionality that CIVICS had. Because CIVICS was a map that showed thousands of citizen initiatives all over Ibero-America, and users usually wanted to see the community projects closer to their place of residence, the map presented a way to filter initiatives according to country, but also according to the type of initiative -i.e., urban art, gender equality, ecology, etc. The web developer working at that moment suggested to Esaú that the map started with all the citizen initiatives selected so that the users would ‘deselect’ what they do not want to see. This was suggested as it would save code and it would not generate ‘sub-pages,’ making the platform faster. However, the prototype of this ‘deselect’ functionality did not impress Diego, from the funding institution of the project. During a meeting with Esaú and other members of VIC’s team, Diego described the functionality as ‘uncomfortable’ for the user, and above everything, it did not make sense because the functionality was thought to represent ‘the specific initiatives of the map, not the whole,’ for the latter was already represented by the map layer. In the end, the ‘deselect’ functionality was reversed to a more conventional ‘select’ functionality. Nonetheless, the situation is telling of the way different actors, with diverse technical knowledge interact and impact in the way the map is made: VIC using architectural strategies to make databases, and web developers conceiving user experience through code efficiency.

Conclusion

This article explored the ways in which social relations between multiple actors involved in the process of composing a participatory map were also important in understanding how the map emerged as a locally specific spatial artefact. The article described the practices, discourses, and understandings of a group of Spanish urbanists that could be catalogued as ‘shallow technical’ mappers using Haklay’s hierarchy of hacking:[28] they reconfigured OpenStreetMap to reuse it in their own project, by creating a map of citizen initiatives in Madrid with its own ‘brand’ identity, designs, and data. However, I argued that the mere analysis of VIC (the actor) and CIVICS (the map based on OMS) was insufficient to grasp the complexities of map-making as a contextual, processual, and emergent practice, so the article focused on the way VIC members coordinated their work with communities, funding institutions, fellow counter-culture collectives, and web developers. Firstly, I showed how the step-to-step process of composing the map was directly related to the way in which VIC needed to respond to managerial tasks set by funding institutions and follow the ethics of working with grassroots and citizens during the mapping workshops at the same time. Secondly, I evidenced how positional knowledge such as aesthetics and architectural knowledge also impacted the way the map interface visualized its database. Finally, I described VIC’s ‘shallow technical’ modus operandi: the use of Excel and subsequent work with web developers.

I suggest that those ethnographic findings are a contribution to map studies for two reasons. Firstly, because they show the usefulness of an analytical framework such as the one proposed by Chris Kelty,[29] that distinguishes and relates practices of composition -material engagements directly related to map-making- and coordination -the mediated relationships and practices between different types of actors involved in the process. Coordination contextualises and reveals localised meaning to the activity of digital map composition, so its exploration contributes to the understudied inquiry of how multi-author dynamics happen in the context of web 2.0 technologies.[30] Secondly, this ethnographic richness of exploring composition and coordination practices helps to understand the subtleties and ambiguities of map-making in contexts where public participation is a desired outcome but comes hand in hand with managerial practices of branding, efficiency, and authority. Multiple actors with multiple intentions point to a simultaneity of functions and uses that the map accomplishes -even if they could seem contradictory or oppositional to the researcher.

Author

Juan Forero

PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University College London

juan.duarte.16@ucl.ac.uk

Juan is an anthropologist, web developer, and occasional Teaching Fellow at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He did an MSc in Digital Anthropology, and he is now undertaking a PhD, both at UCL. He is interested in ethnography, digital objects -such as maps, spreadsheets, and computers-, and the politics of participatory and educational projects in Colombia and Spain.

Notes

[1] “Los Madriles: Atlas de Iniciativas Vecinales”, accessed September 16, 2021, https://losmadriles.org/.

[2] All of the maps above can be found in the following Los Madriles URL: https://losmadriles.org/mapas/.

[3] “CIVICS: Impulsa Tu Ciudad”, accessed September 16, 2021, https://civics.cc/en/#!/iniciativas.

[4] Duggan, Michael. "The Cultural Life of Maps: Everyday Place-Making Mapping Practices." Living Maps Review 3 (2017).

[5] Gutiérrez, Bernardo. Pasado Mañana: Viaje a la España del Cambio. Barcelona: Arpa & Alfil Editores, 2017.

[6] Feenstra, Ramón, Simon Tormey, Andreu Casero-Ripollés, and John Keane. La Configuración de la Democracia: El Laboratorio Político Español. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2017.

[7] Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. “Auto-construction Redux: The City as Method.” Cultural Anthropology 32, No. 3 (2017): 450-478.

[8] Estalella, Adolfo. “Cuidar de la Participación (y no Inventarla).” Prototyping (blog), December 2017. http://www.prototyping.es/participacion/cuidar-de-la-participacion-y-no-inventarla

[9] It is worth noting that none of them are professional cartographers, but they are all interested in the way a participatory map can generate further participatory work, and therefore, further positive impact in the city.

[10] The Regional Federation of Neighbourhood Associations in Madrid.

[11] Bernardo Gutiérrez, “Pasado Mañana”.

[12] Calleja López, Antonio. “Since 15M: The Techno-political Reassembling of Democracy in Spain.” PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2017.

[13] Bherer, Laurence, Mario Gauthier, and Louis Simard, eds. The Professionalization of Public Participation. London: Taylor & Francis, 2017.

[14] Duggan, "The Cultural Life of Maps”; Vertesi, Janet. "Mind the gap: The London underground map and users' representations of urban space." Social Studies of Science 38, no. 1 (2008): 7-33; Duggan, Michael. "Cultures of Enthusiasm: An Ethnographic Study of Amateur Map-maker Communities," Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 54, no. 3 (2019): 217-229; Dalton, Craig. "For Fun and Profit: The Limits and Possibilities of Google-Maps-based Geoweb Applications." Environment and Planning A 47, no. 5 (2015): 1029-1046.

[15] For instance, Muki Haklay analyses the multi-actor mapping practices known as ‘neogeography’ by reviewing the open-source mapping platform called OpenStreetMaps (henceforth, OSM) through different angles -concerning access to infrastructure, skills, and the knowledge necessary to be hacked or appropriated by grassroots or communities. Haklay’s analysis is based on what he terms a ‘hierarchy of hacking,’ that is, a typology of actors according to their ability to ‘hack’ or alter the digital map for their own purposes, so if geoweb apps such as OSM allow most people to change the meaning of a digital tool without changing the technical functionality (what he terms ‘meaning hacking’), very few people have the skills to reconfigure the backend of the app, or to change the source code of it (what he terms ‘deep technical hacking’). Nonetheless, the analysis stops there and Haklay does not ask if there are other social elements beyond technical skills to consider in the hierarchy -and what is more, the relation between actors within the hierarchy is also left unexplored.

[16] Craig Dalton, for example, expands Haklay’s approach by analysing web developers using Google Maps in terms of their positionality -that is, adding cultural and practical codes such as ‘having fun’ to the knowledge of technical codes. However, Dalton also delimits the analysis of web developers as a generic type of social actor, so he does not explore web developers within an everyday entanglement with other actors and practices beyond coding. Yu-Wei Lin also analyses OSM, and the multiple actors involved in its development and deployment, through the lens of the Social Worlds Theory, defining web apps as ‘boundary objects’ through which heterogeneous groups of actors and discourses negotiate amongst themselves, clash, or overlap. However, in practice, her analysis also focuses on making a discursive differentiation between actors -commercial organizations, NGOs, coders, enthusiasts- while leaving behind when, where, and how those negotiations or overlaps happen. Thus, there are analytical oversights, based on theoretical and methodological decisions, that have to do with the social dynamics surrounding the map-making process. Dalton, “For Fun and Profit”; Lin, Yu-Wei. "A Qualitative Enquiry into OpenStreetMap Making." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 17, no. 1 (2011): 53-71.

[17] Kelty, Chris. “Collaboration, Coordination, and Composition: Fieldwork after the Internet.” Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition, edited by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus, 184-206. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. I am also inspired by a current trend of post-constructivist and post-representational approaches to maps and cartography, as those perspectives focus on precisely what other critical analyses -such as the ones explained in the footnotes above- leave behind: the processual, relational, and situational ‘milieu in which mapping practices occur,’ and through which ‘map artefacts’ emerge -what Martin Dodge and others term ‘modes of mapping’. See Perkins, Chris. “Researching Mapping: Methods, Modes and Moments in the (Im)mutability of OpenStreetMap.” Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 5, no. 2 (2013): 1-12; Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. “Rethinking Maps.” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2009): 331-344; Caquard, Sébastien. “Cartography III: A Post-representational Perspective on Cognitive Cartography.” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 2 (2014): 225-235.

[18] Chris Kelty, “Collaboration”, 187.

[19] Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

[20] Latour, Bruno. “Visualization and Cognition.” Knowledge and Society 6, No. 6 (1986): 1-40.

[21] Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

[22] Craig Dalton, “For Fun and Profit”.

[23] Michael Duggan, “Cultures of Enthusiasm”.

[24] Luque-Ayala, Andrés, and Flávia Neves Maia. “Digital Territories: Google Maps as a Political Technique in the Re-making of Urban Informality.” Environment and Planning D 37, no. 3 (2018): 449-467.

[25] Craig Dalton, “For Fun and Profit.”

[26] Dourish, Paul. "No SQL: The shifting materialities of database technology." Computational Culture 4 (2014).

[27] VIC members printed the spreadsheet in a wide-scale format to visualise patterns -i.e., groups of citizen initiatives that could not be found on Facebook, or which of the team members are behind the process of uploading the information from the maps. It is worth noting that when it was printed, Esaú cheerfully commented that they found the way to do ‘data mining’ but through the tools of architects.

[28] Muki Haklay, “Neogeography”. For an explanation of the ‘hierarchy of hacking’ see footnote 15.

[29] Chris Kelty, “Collaboration”.

[30] Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Mapping Modes”.