The thought of participating in a volunteer led movement that could better communities was beyond exciting when I first came to know that was what we would be doing for this assignment, although when I sat and talked with others and thought about what this actually was I realised that I have been doing my own smaller versions of this for years. Be it Coderdojo or teaching cooking classes to children in disadvantaged areas, it may sound a bit up myself but I have been doing smaller scale community led programs for years and so have many people, anyone who ever took part in a daffodil day or taught at one of the mass dojo’s. We just never think about it in the context of what we’re doing will actually better others lives and make a change, we’re doing it because we enjoy being a part of something and doing little things to help.
It becomes daunting when the digital aspect is brought into it as we all know going into this that what we do will be there forever and it is extremely hard to go back on what we’ve done should we make a mistake, mistakes in mapping could cost time and potentially end up being detrimental in an emergency situation. We have the narrative that everything we put online is there forever, and it is, which always make us so apprehensive when it comes to engaging online and making and contribution in online communities because we have some form of impostor syndrome and feel that we as students are not properly qualified to do this as we have not been given the affirmation of a degree that we are capable to make a change in this world. For me at least when I sat and thought about it is what I thought might be the reason for me personally being scared going into this, I’ll go into more depth on this in the implications part or this post as I have a theory that pertains to the fear of making a change.
When it comes to the process I took in the project, I initially went straight to OSM as it had seemed but more exciting to me than MapSwipe, sadly my first impression of the interface and the editing methods were not great. I felt that the user interface was a bit complicated, although once I returned to it after having used MapSwipe for a while I realised that I had been making excuses to procrastinate and not use it as it was a slightly more mentally engaging piece of software.
Most of my work was done on MapSwipe as I could sit and go through it fast and not have it be my sole focus in a situation, for example Netflix have been releasing the Ghibli movies so my week nights were spent watching those with my little sister while I swiped away on my tablet. When I did eventually get around to using OSM properly and sitting down to look at it I realised what an amazingly easy and lovely piece of software it was. Where I live in Cork currently is extremely well mapped so there wasn’t anything to do there really and it wasn’t where I had grown up so I didn’t have the knowledge to mark out local heritage sites and monuments. Limerick however, is a while other story, I know the nooks and crannies of my local area and could see a map from 200 years ago and tell you where everything is in relation to today but something didn’t feel right in intricately mapping my home area. it was too private, something felt intrusive about mapping my neighbors houses and farms, all I could bring myself to do in the end was doing mapping of the ring forts around my house which is quite a lot, 40 within a 5 mile radius. What kept coming to mind was that these were the homes of people I’ve known for 20 years now and what if someone used this information to try and rob them or use it for nefarious purposes, I couldn’t bring myself to do more as I was so scared about putting this information out there. 
Implications! I have had a whole lot of thoughts on this and the fear around making changes and contributing to open street map, to be honest I initially had these thoughts in regards to fellow students of mine being apprehensive about voting and then related it to my fear of adding to OSM. Now we are going to go down the rabbit hole that is the mind of 4 am Athene.
From our very beginnings we have most of our decisions made for us by higher authorities and in most cases we don’t see those decisions having an impact on anyone but ourselves. Now when we go to college the shock of now having to make pretty much all your decisions for yourself is jarring for most, eventually you get over as you once again have the realisation that these choices pretty much only affect you and your life. (This thought process was initially about voting so we’re just gonna go with that and I’ll tie it all together) When we’re asked to vote we are asked to make a decision that is going to have an effect on the millions of people and most people will use the excuse of they don’t think their vote makes a difference when in reality subconsciously they’re brain is freaking out because if they’ve only just recently become accustomed to making decisions for themselves how are they supposed to be able to comprehend making decisions that will affect the rest of the country and its inhabitants. Until people realise that every single decision they make has an affect on the world around them they won’t really ever be comfortable making huge decisions like that, hopefully they’ll grow up and realise that even if they don’t want to, that they should have their voice and input heard but I have had that argument far too many times over the last 9 weeks. When it come to tie-ing the altogether with people’s apprehension towards using OSM, it’s the same concept, this is not a huge decision but it is a choice to make an contribution that could in turn affect the way someone interacts with the world around them and who knows, it could have a negative or positive impact on the community but we have to be aware and be face to face with the fact that what we’re putting out there is for others to use in a good way but it may get used by others for damaging purposes. You won’t know but it’s worth the chance because that extra road you map could save an old person who live in an old house slightly off the beaten track that isn’t mapped on google but you went and marked it on OSM and an ambulance was able to get to them in an emergency.
I thought I myself had gotten over this fear of making a change as I’ve been so heavily involved in voter drives and always encourage others to vote but from this experience I guess I will have to go through that process for each new decision I make. A nice thing I found out from this was actually a new tool that is used by the geography students in college called ESRI collector, which is a mapping app used to gather data whilst doing fieldwork and My whole jam is using digital tools in education at all levels so this was an extremely exciting discovery. Now I haven’t been able to find much online about how it work exactly and I’m going to have to take some time to use it but I didn’t have the time to look over it before I was to finish this. I have a few friends who have used it for their class who are in the college and I will be asking them about what they thought about from just a regular students perspective rather than that of a student like me who uses digital learning tools on the daily. I think learning from others experience will allow me to understand what we in DH need to do to make the digital tools we contribute to more accessible for academics not in DH 
We use crowdsourcing every day. The internet is nearly completely crowdsourcing, it was created to be an ongoing project that billions of people take part in developing and contributing to. If you have put anything on the internet you have made a contribution to a huge crowdsourced project. People don’t realise that they are all involved in the development of the internet and its ever-changing, ever-growing entity that is the internet, I don’t need to try to figure out how I will use it in my day to day because I already do, now obviously there are more niche projects to be involved in like CoderDojo, which is more real life based rather than online( at least it was when I taught there) but it is solely volunteer ad person led and we rely on the help and goodness of others to take their time to help teach a few kids scratch or HTML. I do feel as though I need to interact with much smaller projects, I enjoy interacting with the online historical sewing community and contributing theories and information but part of me feels I’m not doing enough to better those who also interact with these communities.
I’ve actually remembered something I created at a hackathon in Glasgow called “Community lost, Capitalism found” which was looking at derelict or abandoned buildings in the local area and we would gather stories from the local people about what the community was like when these buildings or industry were active and helped the people who lived there and it would also look at gentrified areas that had taken these community gems and put a high-rise or terraced houses in their place that wasn’t being used, which would eventually lead to tours led by local community groups showing the areas that had been affected and would also eventually lead to squatting events holding talks by people who had been made homeless or affected by these changes made by local government.
