Understanding the activity of contributors to VGI projects. How, why, where, and when do they contribute geographic information?

The crowdsourced collection of geographic information (Volunteered Geographic Information VGI) has moved to the center of the research agenda in Web technologies and GIS. Much of the current VGI research is tightly coupled with issues related to the quality of the collected geodata and possible conflation or comparison with other official sources of geodata. This paper presents research which attempts to quantitatively understand the activity patterns of citizen contributors to VGI projects. We argue that the concept of a large unbounded crowd of citizen contributors is something of a misnomer and that majority of work carried out in VGI collection and management is performed by a small, potentially, unconnected 'crowd' of contributors. We attempt to analyse how, why, where , and when these contributors work with VGI projects. OpenStreetMap is used as a case-study VGI project.