Who Draws the Lines? The Case for Decentralized Map Making

Billions of people rely on maps to safely and efficiently navigate our world. Maps aren't food, clothing or shelter, but they're about as close to a basic human need as you can get.

The vast majority of mainstream digital maps are created and maintained by a select group of cartography companies.

Each map conveys a particular viewpoint shaped by its creators. Plotting points and drawing boundaries may seem straightforward, but these tasks involve numerous choices and inherent biases. For example, a restaurant may sponsor a navigation feature that shows their destination as “recommended” despite distance, star rating and so on. In this case, the map forms a pay-to-play ecosystem where businesses that “sponsor” dominate navigation and traffic, despite not necessarily being the “best” option.

Monetizing a map is not itself a malicious act, but it does carry significant consequences if the only free-to-use consumer products are primarily directed by ad spend. On the other hand, map companies must generate revenue to sustain map data collection and innovation. As a result, most public consumer maps make trade-offs between corporate suggestions and data freshness and accuracy.

On the business-to-business side, map companies rely on proprietary information to remain competitive. Therefore, free-to-access maps are rarely as dynamic, fresh, and data-rich as they could be.

When it comes to publicly available map environments, most of us make do with the few free map sources at hand. These maps are generally operated by large entities that have long dominated internet search and discovery. While they continue to update maps and roll out new features, their priorities and motivations aren’t always aligned with the public's interests.

A recent X post by a former Senior UX Researcher for Google Maps, Kasey Klimes, highlighted this issue. Klimes explains the internal rationale behind Google Maps not including “scenic” or “safe” navigation options. The thread, which has since amassed millions of views, is filled with critics questioning the company's motivations for omitting these highly requested features.

The decisions made by cartographers reflect their understanding and the data they have. Most maps today are not a singular perspective but rather a patchwork of data from "trusted sources." While map companies can cross-reference sources to improve accuracy, it's an imperfect system.

Despite their best efforts, mapping companies have faced significant challenges in verifying the truth and accuracy of their data. Geographic disputes, censorship, accidental additions/omissions, and bad actors seeking financial or political gain all present opportunities for data corruption.

For example:

We'd like to believe that most map companies would never intentionally mislead the public, but it's naive to think that external sources and authorities might not exert control over map entities. Mark Monmonier said it best in his book How to Lie with Maps: "Because most map users willingly tolerate white lies on maps, it's not difficult for maps to also tell more serious lies."

Blindly trusting a single source of information is a recipe for disaster. As technology creates more sophisticated ways for compromised data sets to infiltrate map providers, companies are looking for better, more efficient ways to verify information at scale.

In 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM) proposed the first major open-source solution to the map-making bias problem. It relied on the collective intelligence of global volunteers plotting geospatial data for anyone to use and reference.

OSM has been a significant step in the right direction for mapping. Hivemapper and almost every other cartography agency enthusiastically support and use the OSM database to create mapping foundations. As an open initiative, OSM doesn't house any overt bias and allows the entire network to determine what is true and accurate.

However, it is not without its issues. Lacking direct incentives or remuneration for independent contributors, the OSM platform today runs mostly on old or donated imagery from major corporations. While the system remains open for edits, buffering against blatant corruption of geospatial data, OSM still struggles to keep pace with modern cartography efforts.

Many errors and biases slip through the cracks, burdening map makers with a constant game of whack-a-mole. Although the solution is more immune to singular manipulation, it is not completely impervious. Cartographic data warfare remains an issue, and independent users can periodically corrupt map information, as seen with the mysterious user editing OSM in China’s favor.

In a perfect world, who would draw the lines? We would — all of us. Not just a select group of cartographers. If given equal opportunity to access fresh and accurate data, we’d throw off the shackles of siloed and gatekept mapping ecosystems and create a complete, fresh, and infinitely customizable map experience.

It all amounts to data.

We have the model for openness from OSM, but it doesn’t overcome the issues of collecting and vetting unbiased data while maintaining a network of valid sources. Unfortunately, human intermediaries are fallible. Middlemen corrupt sources, keep fresh data behind lock and key, and inject maps with their own biases.

But what if the “human” element was minimized? What if we could create a self-regulating map network that only presented honest information? With blockchain technology, this

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