Full Proposal Template
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World Bank Knowledge for Change Program – Full Proposal Template Basic Data: Title OpenStreetMap and the World Bank: teaching, learning, and improving Linked Project ID P161480 Product Line RA Applied Amount ($) 100 K Est. Project Period 01/01/2020 – 30/06/2021 Team Leader(s) Benjamin P. Stewart Managing Unit DECAT Contributing unit(s) Funding Window Innovation in Data Production, Analysis and Dissemination Regions/Countries World General: 1. What is the Development Objective (or main objective) of this Grant? Data are increasingly important to how World Bank staff plan, design, implement, and monitor projects. Despite this, WB staff are often poor stewards of global public repositories of information, an issue which should be addressed. Spatial data on roads, settlements, buildings, population density, etc are fundamental to all development projects. The World Bank’s Geospatial Operational Support Team (GOST) is mandated to improve the WB’s efforts to systematically collect and maintain these data. GOST aims to do this by also encouraging and supporting our clients in the design, collection, and maintenance of such data; this necessitates a globally accessible and available repository. GOST, therefore proposes adopting OpenStreetMap (OSM) as our official repository for road features, building footprints, settlements, and other OSM appropriate features. We further propose that we invest in a sustainable means of improving the OSM, of leveraging OSM, and of teaching OSM to World Bank staff and clients. While OSM is a global public good by itself, there are inherent biases in the coverage, completeness, and accuracy of the repository; biases of which we are not currently aware. We hypothesize that the OSM repository will be less complete in rural areas of high poverty (Anderson et al 2019). This is important because OSM is used as a foundational dataset in numerous analytical frameworks, and if it under-represents the poorest, these populations will be mis-represented. Additionally, we know that female participation in contributions to OSM is quite low (Schmidt and Klettner 2013, Yang et al. 2019), and this introduces bias in the repository. By re-designing how we deliver OSM capacity building efforts, we hope to encourage more female participation, and identify areas of bias. OSM represents an opportunity for the World Bank to be a leader in open data, transparency in analytics, and project monitoring and evaluation. This proposal aims to coordinate the World Bank efforts around OSM, improve our understanding of OSM’s inherent flaws, and centralize our capacity building efforts. 2. Summary description of Grant financed activities This project will have three separate tasks focusing on better understanding OSM, and better contributing to it: Page 1 of 10 World Bank Knowledge for Change Program – Full Proposal Template 1. Design a methodology that assesses the quality and completeness of OSM; apply that methodology to three countries, at least one of which will be a country classified as FCV (Fragility, Conflict, and Violence affected). a. Compare these OSM completeness maps to a series of foundational World Bank datasets; notably locations of World Bank Group projects, and recent maps of poverty. Comparisons will be tested through a suite of map comparison methodologies (Hagen-Zanker, 2008). b. Based our knowledge of the completeness of OSM, identify how the incompleteness of OSM affects our catalog of OSM tools. 2. Catalog analytical tools designed to run against OSM a. As a consistent global repository of data, numerous tools have been developed against OSM that should be portable to various geographies i. E.g. GOSTNets, a tool developed by GOST to improve accessibility mapping using open data b. The tool catalog will be used to identify holes in the World Bank analytical offerings. 3. Standardize, organize, and coordinate geospatial training for clients using OSM a. GOST is already coordinating ongoing geospatial training happening in the Energy unit around the use of geospatial planning tools (P164156), a new effort led by GOST to improve geospatial information uptake in fragile countries (P170441), and World Bank support to census (P118858) 3. What are the main risks related to the Grant financed activity? Are there any potential conflicts of interest for the Bank? How will these risks/conflicts be monitored and managed? The risks from this activity are minimal – the OpenStreetMap repository is open and collaborative, and the World Bank is going to continue to utilize and support OSM regardless of the output of this activity. Looking at OSM from a larger perspective, there are potential risks from the platform, notably vandalism (Ballatore, 2014) and validation (Wroclawski 2018). These both relate to the issue of validation and accuracy in an open data project. While this is a concern with addressing in the activity itself (how do we validate and ensure accuracy in the maps?), it is not a fundamental concern for how the activity is implemented. 4. (Optional question) What can/has been done to find an alternative source of financing, i.e. instead of a Bank administered Grant? The Geospatial Operational Support Team (GOST) have already committed resources to supporting this initiative (detailed in the associated budget document). Additionally, this initiative is meant to coordinate and integrate with several existing initiatives which GOST support: a Geospatial training through the Energy unit as part of the ongoing Geospatial Electrification Platform (GEP) – P164156 b GOST are leading an effort to improve the use of geospatial tools in fragile countries – P170441 KCPIII Specific: 1. How does (do) the objective(s) of this proposal align with the World Bank Group’s twin goals? What are the key thematic research questions being addressed in this research? The purpose of this project is multi-fold: a To improve our client countries’ capacity to create, manage, and use geospatial information – in the end, this will reduce costs related to data collection, management, and analysis. The World Bank has delivered OSM training as part of capacity building efforts in numerous projects and in numerous regions, but the efforts have been sporadic. By centralizing and coordinating our capacity building efforts, we hope Page 2 of 10 World Bank Knowledge for Change Program – Full Proposal Template to improve participation and reduce costs for such training programs, and better tailor our training to client needs. b To improve the World Bank’s understanding of OSM and its limitations. OSM is an exemplary open, big, geospatial dataset that has global coverage, leverages crowd sourcing, and often out performs similar commercial datasets. Despite the widespread usage of OSM, we rarely interrogate its flaws and biases, despite the established literature highlighting the heterogeneity of OSM edits (Anderson et al. 2019, Anwar 2018). Accounting for the biases in the data should allow us to better tailor our tools and analyses to better serve our clients. c To standardize delivery of information and tools related to OSM to both World Bank staff and out clients. There are numerous tools based off OSM designed to increase our knowledge of climate (Lao et al. 2018, World Bank 2014), poverty (Oshri et al. 2018), and female participation in STEM (Schmidt and Klettner, 2013). These methodologies are all based on OSM and should therefore be transferrable to other regions and projects. By standardizing how we educate people about OSM, and use OSM in our projects, we will be able to open entire regions and sectors to the usefulness of OSM. 2. Describe analytic design & methodology. Elaborate on hypotheses, conceptual framework, data (survey design if applicable). The first task is to develop methods to assess the completeness of OSM and address two questions 1. How does incomplete OSM data affect spatial analysis? a. We will look at the standard OSM tools we currently use, and see how they are affected by systematic removal of information from the dataset. 2. Where is OSM incomplete? Is there a pattern across countries as to the completeness of OSM? a. The hypothesis is that OSM is not homogenously incomplete but will follow patterns of development i.e. – poor, rural areas will be less complete. However, areas prone to disaster may buck this trend, as the disaster response community often works very hard to update the OSM database in response to disasters. b. The analytical approach will vary depending on the results of the OSM completeness assessments. However, the basic process will be: i. Generate a map of OSM completeness at a country-scale ii. Compare OSM completeness map to maps of poverty, conflict, etc. using standard map- comparison methodologies (Hagen-Zanker, Martens 2008). Most of the data will be derived from OSM directly, but we will also use several existing data sources with the World Bank: 1. Building footprints: The World Bank has purchased building footprints for several countries from vendors specializing in machine learning. These will serve as a comparator to the OSM database. 2. Poverty data: we will compare the OSM maps to the best available poverty data from the World Bank. 3. Conflict data: we will map conflict using a few reputable open repositories and compare to our OSM completeness assessment. 3. Provide a literature review & explain study’s intellectual merit. An annotated bibliography is attached at the bottom of this proposal and is referenced in some of the questions herein. As evidenced through the bibliography, there