Er, I don’t think “whataboutery” based on a particular example person helps the general discussion.
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I think this is a discussion that should’ve happened in a country-specific forum first, to establish whether the practice even aligns with the norms of the country in question. Of course everyone has an interest in making sure the overall project follows sound practices, but I’m afraid we’ve given the project a serious culture shock on top of the serious issues presented here.
In a U.S. context, intentionally patronizing minority-owned businesses seeks to counter historical injustices, some of which were perpetrated through maps. Many of the businesses in question are located in formerly redlined neighborhoods or owned by people who grew up in those places. Of course we aren’t going to write a Wikipedia article about individual shopkeepers in OSM, so the discussion focuses on how to boil that down to something brief and intuitive.
In a sense, this is similar to the debate over affirmative action in workplace hiring and school admissions. Affirmative action has been a fraught political issue for decades. But spotlighting Black- or women-owned businesses tends to raise less animated opposition than affirmative action, because it’s difficult to identify someone who is directly harmed by shopkeepers being proud of their ethnicity or consumers choosing to shop more. People may find it “cringe”, as expressed earlier, but conflating it with racial discrimination is also cringeworthy.
My family used to run a minority-owned business. It was a metal construction company, so the retail trends here were irrelevant. Instead, the main opportunity we had came from government programs that allotted some percentage of construction contracts to small, disadvantaged business enterprises (DBEs) that partnered with larger, non-minority “mentor” firms. To participate, we had to certify our minority status with the city and state governments, so we were in a government database online. I don’t think anyone who participated in this process considered the database to be a form of Big Brother – more like free, mostly useless advertising.
The procurement process left us kind of jaded. The people meant well, but the process seemed to help the mentors and consultants more than the DBEs. Say what you want about consumers wanting to feel good about themselves for shopping at Black-owned stores, but at least the dollars wind up in the intended pockets.
Even though I’m sympathetic to the idea of documenting the real-world phenomenon of these “Black-owned business” signs, I think we should distinguish between allowing a shopkeeper to characterize themselves to the public and making that characterization easily queryable. This seems to lie at the heart of the concerns over a nefarious future government or hate group abusing the data.
Google Maps is an imperfect precedent because they tightly control the data. On that platform, random Internet users can’t contribute information about the shopkeeper on their behalf, and if anyone wanted a comprehensive listing of these businesses, they’d have to ask Google, who would probably decline on privacy grounds. If a future government were to demand this data, they would fight it in court or delete it preemptively. Can we say the same about the data we’d publish?
In my opinion, if we map this information, then at a minimum, it should not be structured data that’s easily queried. I don’t think it’s worth bikeshedding over tag naming because there shouldn’t be a dedicated tag for this information. The description key is good enough for now. If we want this key to be more presentable, perhaps we can start cleaning up all the superlatives, unverifiable awards won, quack medicinal claims, and misleading place names in this key.
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Ask yourself if it would be OK to tag white owned business in the United States as such or if a white own barber shop could put a sign outside their business window saying “best side crop hair cuts in the county” without them being smered as white supremecists all over the internet by supposedly tolerant liberals. That’s why its cringe and discriminatory. It only goes one way and comes at the cost of excluding certain racial/culture groups. Its also those things because at the end of the day signs outside of businesses saying what race the shop owner is does nothing to balance out or make up for systemic racism. It just gives (Probably good intentioned) liberals the feels. That’s it. And that’s fine, but by OpenStreetMap loses its neutrality (and at least IMO some credability) by turning that kind of information into a tagging scheme and/or creating a map based on it. “Hey everyone. Check out my racial map based on OpenStreetMap data” isn’t a good look regardless of the broader issues around systemic racism in the United States or whatever.
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This is why I would advocate for a measured approach. No tagging scheme can capture the nuance of race or gender satisfactorily – some participants in this conversation have previously pointed out Wikidata’s shortcomings in this regard. A classic OSM approach would leave us tagging the presence of signs, which does little for anyone other than sign nerds like myself, and handwave about OSM’s mythical companion reviews database. At least this kind of information, for better or worse, is not an outlier in the description key, and maybe this discussion could help us finally do something to clean up that key.
When I originally wrote up the social equity wiki page in 2020, I didn’t have these storefront signs in mind. However, I was thinking about how the pandemic had wiped out my city’s Latino- and women-owned businesses especially severely. Many of these businesses never made it onto Yelp or Google for the same reasons we were less likely to map them organically. Their Internet presence was minimal; they relied primarily on word of mouth and displaying their business cards at each others’ cash registers. And we all gravitate toward familiar places and cultures; our online reviews reflect that.
The irony in all this discussion is that the vast majority of the “Black-owned business” signs are posted in front of businesses that aren’t in OSM yet. If you belong to a minority group and zoom into an ethnic enclave to see a map with nothing but chain stores and predatory loan sharks, would it be any different than staring at a pre-TIGER map?
So my suggestion from 2020 stands: let’s spend our energy on getting more minority-owned businesses on the map. Since we’re no longer in the throes of a pandemic, we can even complement these government databases with shoe-leather mapping. Come for a POI, stay for a hearty meal and a glimpse at some street art. Come away with more grist for OSM and maybe a greater appreciation of the diversity around you. Tell some folks about OSM while you’re at it.
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OSM is not a soapbox for your liberal bias.
Edit: The liberal brigade flagged my post as “offensive, abusive or hateful”, which it is not. Attention mods: These people are abusing the system to hide views they disagree with.
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Feel free to substitute “minority-owned” with “undermapped”. 
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That was actually going to be my suggested alternative since it’s kind of putting the cart before the horse to map which businesses are minority owned when they aren’t even in OpenStreetMap to begin with. Maybe it will give people an extra push to add said businesses in the first place though. Who knows. I’m not even really against this in practice as long as it’s done in a measured way. I just don’t see how it can be. Although confining it tags like advertised:ownership and requiring advertised:source along with it would be good steps in that direction. It having the benefit of cleaning up the description key would also be a bonus in the interm.
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At the start of this thread, I said that I thought including information about minority-owned businesses and women-owned business in OSM was a good idea, but that I would like to hear other people’s opinions.
This thread certainly has had a lot of opinions! I appreciate everyone who has contributed to this discussion without making it about politics or making it personal. I hope that everyone who has come to this thread takes away an appreciation and respect for the diversity of opinions, including opinions that differ from theirs.
That said, I think it’s clear that there’s no consensus (edit) on tagging businesses mapped in OSM as minority-owned or women-owned businesses at this time:
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There are clearly quite a few people who are opposed to this. Respecting their opinions means that there should not be a focus on adding this information to OSM.
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There are also clearly quite a few people who are in favor of this. Respecting their opinions means that there should not be a focus on removing this information from OSM.
@Minh_Nguyen has made some very good points that there are underserved and undermapped communities where very few businesses of any type have been mapped. And in particular, that mapping practices that rely on using easily accessible information are likely to leave these areas underserved and undermapped. I think that filling in these gaps in the map will benefit everyone, including minority and women business owners. I hope that anyone who is passionate about either side of this issue will contribute to mapping more small, local businesses!
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I had a closer look through the terms and related law. As always, IANAL
Without taking steps that are incompatible with open data, we’re stuck with being unable to build a database of some types of personal information. This includes, among other items,
- racial or ethnic origin,
- sexual orientation, or
- religious beliefs.
Notably, it does not include gender.
This means we can’t create a database of black-owned business ownership information, or other protected criteria. It would be possible to tag businesses that identify as women-owned and distribute that database.
This doesn’t impact LGBTQ+ friendly, since that doesn’t have personal information - the business owner need not be LGBTQ+ for the business to identify as friendly.
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I understand that we as an organization can decide whether or not to include to information about business self-identification. It should be something that is consistent with the projects guidelines.
What am tired of hearing about is privacy issues. This is public information that people are posting on signs, websites and ads that
everyone can see. I like to think that the ownered considered it might also attract the wrong crowd.
It is no different than someone proclaiming thier religon with a cross or other religious symbology attacted to a building. Something churches, synagogues and mosques do on a routinely basis even though some have been attacked and even burned to ground. My guess is that they think it worth it.
Why should business who self report thier membership of a protected group be treated differently. Doesn’t advertising Halal or Kosher food have the same likelihood of attracting those who hate Muslims or Jews.
Yes, I am all being responsible and double checking before including the information on a business.
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Incidentally the note that the restaurant was mapped from makes no mention of ownership.
Wugh what. How did I end up clicking “Like” on that. I really do not like that.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Because the content of this topic is inherently political, I am not going to censor messages where people accuse each other of bias. Your addendum though was not helpful, throwing around inflammatory phrases like “liberal Brigade” and “mind virus” does not further discussion.
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If you look up a definition of a soapbox it includes this description: “platform used by a self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator”. Online forums such as this are exactly that. Everybody that participates falls under the definition of ‘self-appointed orator’.
Unfortunately @Richard I do not know how to remove your like. I think after awhile it is unfortunately permanent?
People, emotive language for a topic like this cannot be avoided, but please try to be as professional as possible and use phrases like “This is ethical because…”, or “This is unethical because…”
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This topic was automatically opened after 4 hours.
If anyone was desperate to map this sort of thing I would suggest a tag like locally_owned would serve just as well without the racial implications and could perhaps be interpretted differently in local areas.
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I am against recording this type of information for two reasons:
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I am generally skeptical about recording details that might change overnight without people noticing; for example whether a certain supermarket chain participates in a certain fair trade scheme or so. A shop owner can change overnight without the appearance of the shop changing at all.
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We are already running close to privacy rights violation in the EU by recording the names of individuals who run a business (in the operator or name tags). There is a somewhat-consensus that when individuals running a business volunteer this information on signs to passers-by, this constitutes a consent to data processing, but this is not legally watertight at all, and even if it were, this consent could be withdrawn at any time, or on a case-by-case basis. With small one-person businesses, sometimes even operated from a residential property, the line between recording a business and recording private circumstances of a person starts to blur. Recording even the names of the individuals could be seen as problematic; recording an individual person’s ethnicity or other personal attributes would certainly go too far in my opinion.
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