Looking forward to meeting this new cohort of students and what they will bring to CIM!
Carlos Cámara
Admin
@ccamara@bonfire.cim.warwick.ac.uk
Principal Research Software Engineer at CIM piloting this #bonfire instance. Expect a mix of RT from my mastodon account with genuine posts about #bonfire and the #fediverse
- Joined
- Website
- carloscamara.es/en
- Also on
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@ccamara@scholar.social
- Also on
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@datasaurus@pixelfed.social
Carlos Cámara
boosted
The new academic year is officially starting!
Director Prof. Cagatay Turkay is welcoming the 2026-27 cohort and introducing what makes CIM unique.
Excited with what's about to start!
Carlos Cámara
boosted
I think there's a pretty annoying habit of mansplaining on the #OpenStreetMap forum. I've hadn't noticed it until now 'cause I'd never engaged in a long thread before, but damn. Men are explaining basic OSM principles to me like I haven't been a part of this project for over 4 years, linking to them multiple times too. Telling me I should read previous comments again "slowly", and insinuating that I just don't understand the topic at hand.
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I discovered #tic80 (a retro-looking "fantasy console") around 2019. I enthusiastically used it, advocated for it, taught it to kids a lot, and contributed to the code.
Three weeks ago, the maintainer started using LLM tools to review and write PRs, and seems to be using them for communication, as well. I actively avoid such communities.
I'm so sad. It feels like losing something I loved.
Does anyone know #creativecoding projects with a no-LLM contribution policy?
@blinry@chaos.social this might be of your interest codeberg.org/ethical-foss/op...
Carlos Cámara
boosted
🏛️ France is cutting ties with US tech giants by 2027. The EU is building its own alternatives. Are you dependent on the GAFAM empire?
Take back control with our guide to consciously choosing the digital tools that are right for you: https://tacticaltech.org/news/insights/choosing_digital_tools_in_the_age_of_ai/
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@ccamara ah, sorry I replied to the other toot, before seeing this. Yes, indeed!
@smallcircles@social.coop hahaha, NP! I think we are on the same wavelenght!
It is a good article. I referred to the hashtags in the toot, just as a nitpick. But with the added observation that the dominance of Mastodon puts the remainder of the fediverse in the shade as it were. There are people on the fedi who do not know what fediverse is. They are "on Mastodon", they say. But they encounter perhaps posts from 50 other microblog and other apps. The broader public mostly only learns about Mastodon, but the fediverse is much more than that. Our communications unwittingly shape the public image. There is a recentralization danger here too.
(I don't point this out with a regular person, but I may do so now and then with institutions and journalists).
@smallcircles@social.coop I see. I believe you refer to the original post from @fsf@hostux.social , because they said follow us on MAstodon, while they can be followed (and are!) by the whole fediverse. Good point. And good point about not needing to be picky with individuals, but to do so with specialised profiles, such as journalists or foundations like the FSF, which tend to be very precise with their use of language. Agree.
Carlos Cámara
boosted
I'm looking for a service for colaborative authoring a series of documents (book-type). My requirements are:
- For not technical users
- Creation of accounts for collaaborators should be optional
- Allow some (basic) formatting (markdown allowed)
- (optional) allow document's structure
So far, my two contestants are #framapad and #kackmd a repo with a #quarto website. Thoughts? Alternatives?
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Remote activity:
@lahax@keskonfai.fr Oh, no, I missed it due to different time zone! (Is there a feature request for making Time Zones visible in the event's page?)
@smallcircles@social.coop Not sure that I'm following your point (probably due to automated translation, as I do not speak Dutch).
I think the @fsf@hostux.social does a good job explaining that, while Bluesky may be presenting itself as federated, this is partially true and there are a number of differences that go beyond using different protocols (ATProto vs ActivityPub). But maybe I'm missing something?
@smallcircles@social.coop but I agree that some do get confused by assuming that #Mastodon (a software), #Fediverse (an ecosystem), #ActivityPub (a protocol) are synonyms and some pedagogy is needed, especially to journalists who write about this. And especially if they are making comparison with other things that are not comparable (e.g. #Bluesky)
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The hashtag use caught my eye, making the false equivalent between Mastodon and ATProto, same thing I pointed out yesterday to a journalist. In Dutch:
@smallcircles@social.coop Not sure that I'm following your point (probably due to automated translation, as I do not speak Dutch).
I think the @fsf@hostux.social does a good job explaining that, while Bluesky may be presenting itself as federated, this is partially true and there are a number of differences that go beyond using different protocols (ATProto vs ActivityPub). But maybe I'm missing something?
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Posted in
CriticAI Community
Only members of CriticAI Community can read this
An apparently strange move from the FSF, turns to be an interesting reading about what #fediverse and #floss really being to the table
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Carlos Cámara
boosted
Another chapter of #AI extracting and abusing the commons. Today is #zenodo 's turn, but before it has been #OpenStreetMap, #Wikipedia... This clearly shows that they are not looking for knowledge (knowledge was already there in the open) but about appropriating and fencing it.
Carlos Cámara
boosted
The recording of the talk "CoMaps: How to make a community based map navigation app based on OpenStreetMap" which @dmlls and @gedankenstuecke gave at State of the Map last Sunday is already out!
If you couldn't watch it live, it's available here: https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/w/9DGz6jXc2wG93XohZweE8M
A very big thanks to the @sotm video team for getting those videos done so quickly (and of course also to the rest of the organising team for a job so well done!)
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Carlos Cámara
boosted
What shocked me at #sotm2026 is the gender imbalance in the public and presenters. I counted about 80% men, 20% women in the presenters, and I think that the public was possibly even more strongly biased towards men.
This seems to echo the results of this article from 2019, whose authors surveyed a small sample of contributors (N≈300), and found not only that men represented 87% of them, but also that men were more prolific than women in their contributions. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-019-10035-z
One anecdotal datapoint was that the only talk where I have been this weekend, which had more women than men attending, was a talk about mapping accessibility.
I obviously haven't been to all the sessions, so I don't know if this issue was discussed somewhere at some point. But I think that this is rarely a sign of a healthy community. Shouldn't such an imbalance be one of the most urgent problems that we should tackle? Is the OSM community hostile to women? At which stage: are they dissuaded to even enter it, or do they quickly leave after joining? Why?
OriginalPaper
GeoJournal
Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: responding to theories of female (under) representation in crowdsourced mapping
Z.
Gardner,
P.
Mooney,
S.
De Sabbata,
L.
Dowthwaite
December 1, 2020
#Environmental Management
#Geography, general
#Human Geography
This paper presents the results of an exploratory quantitative analysis of gendered contributions to the online mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM), in which previous research has identified a strong male participation bias. On these grounds, theories of representation in volunteered geographic information (VGI) have argued that this kind of crowdsourced data fails to embody the geospatial interests of the wider community. The observed effects of the bias however, remain conspicuously absent from discourses of VGI and gender, which proceed with little sense of impact. This study addresses this void by analysing OSM contributions by gender and thus identifies differences in men’s and women’s mapping practices. An online survey uniquely captured the OSM IDs as well as the declared gender of 293 OSM users. Statistics relating to users’ editing and tagging behaviours openly accessible via the ‘how did you contribute to OSM’ wiki page were subsequently analysed. The results reveal that volumes of overall activity as well editing and tagging actions in OSM remain significantly dominated by men. They also indicate subtle but impactful differences in men’s and women’s preferences for modifying and creating data, as well as the tagging categories to which they contribute. Discourses of gender and ICT, gender relations in online VGI environments and competing motivational factors are implicated in these observations. As well as updating estimates of the gender participation bias in OSM, this paper aims to inform and stimulate subsequent discourses of gender and representation towards a new rationale for widening participation in VGI.
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Carlos Cámara
boosted
@Armavica totally agree! And while ironically I embody that very hegemonic demographics you're rightly pointing out, my talk at #SOTM2026 ("Whose Knowledge Counts? Analysing Diversity and Exclusion in OpenStreetMap's Tagging Proposals Process") was precisely about this, but in a very specific contribution type: tagging proposals.
The first part of the session covered why maps are not neutral and why the lack of diversity is an issue.
You can see the slides here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22158699
