I&#x27;m not entirely sure this article ever makes some sort of conclusion, but I think it mistakenly projects problems that often occur within open online community projects in general onto open street map. For example, osm still values information from people on the ground over information aggregated from tertiary sources - while a community like Wikipedia would instead value the latter greatly over the former. Those sorts of distinctions make osm perhaps not more engaging but certainly a nicer thing to contribute to.<p>Otherwise, I think some of the issues raised in the article regarding ease of contributing for locals is very much an issues of technology access that is outside the scope of the osm community.<p>Aside: I&#x27;m amazed at how good the coverage on osm of some third world cities (particularly slums) is - far better than any other online mapping service I&#x27;ve seen.