User:Rupertmaesglas

I’m Rupert Allan. I'm an OpenSource advocate, ethicist, author and field-mapper and believe in the Wiki ethos and Creative Commons principle.

I am fascinated with how people engage with - and belong in - their surroundings. As a spatial designer, I have devised, conceptualised, realised and communicated designs for built environment, disaster relief, environmental wellbeing and humanitarian interventions, having learned my trade in behavioural and performance designs in the Film, Theatre and TV industries. I helped devise the ‘Motorcycle Mapping’ concept of Open Mapping for Emergency and Development contexts, and write about this, surveillance capitallism and data colonialism in the concluding chapter of the book 'Mapping Crisis; Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping'(https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv14rms6g).

I believe culture to be intrinsic to this kind of life-saving DIY tech, and have worked on projects connecting OSM with Wikimedia for the National Library of Wales and the UN, amongst other orgs.

My OSM Philosophy: OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap is the ‘wiki-map’ which is jointly-owned by the people of the world. It depends on the digital revolution to empower people within their own communities to take control of how they are represented, mapped, and seen by the outside world. The project finds its heart not in the technology or tools it uses, or commercially interested organisations backing it, but in the Open Street Map itself, the publicly owned wiki-style platform, accessible to anyone via Smartphone or Computer, to edit, use or develop.

It is a transparent, cost-neutral project by which donors can engage and collaborate with their field counterparts, giving time rather than money to support the production of commonly owned visualisations from satellite and field data. This enables the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the form of engineering, medical, and cultural intervention, in areas generally considered ‘inaccessible’ and ‘precarious’.

Potentially, it changes everything.