FOSS Mapping as Alternative Media: The Case of OpenStreetMap (Part 4)

OSM in Action.

During the six years of history, the OSM project has been able to grow thanks to the volunteer work of an active community of amateur mappers and developers. Although this community is geographically dispersed around the world, it has organized itself in several localized projects. In the OSM wiki it is [...]

FOSS Mapping as Alternative Media: The Case of OpenStreetMap (Part 2)

In July of 2004, Steve Coast, a 24-year-old British computer scientist and entrepreneur, started OpenStreetMap (OSM) with the objective of creating a free editable map of the world. Tired of the problems data proprietary companies generate by the restricting geographical information (In the UK, as in other European countries, geographic information is very expensive and [...]

FOSS Mapping as Alternative Media: The Case of OpenStreetMap (Part 1)

On January 12 2010, after the catastrophic earthquake (magnitude 7.0 Mw) near Port au Prince that triggered a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of volunteers distributed across the globe worked together to create an updated and complete digital map of Haiti. Using computers, photographic imagery, and the tools from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, they were able to [...]

Children and the Social Construction of the Personal Computer (Part 2)

Children-Computer Symbiosis and the Reinvention of Childhood

Since the 1950s, researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and computer science, were asking questions about how humans learn and think. At university laboratories they were designing theories of the mind and imagining machines that could think and augment human intelligence. One of the most influential [...]

Children and the Social Construction of the Personal Computer (Part 1)

The cover of BYTE magazine (the small systems journal) from November, 1976, is a color photograph of two children sat in front of what it seems to be a home computer system. The children are not looking at the camera. Instead, they are looking the screen of a 15” TV monitor that is placed in [...]