Towards Equal Street Names with Open Data

17.02.2020 - Médecins Sans Frontières : 46 Rue de l'Arbre Bénit / Gewijde-Boomstraat - 1050 Brussels

The names of public spaces (streets, avenues, squares and others) define the identity of a city and how citizens interact with it. Brussels suffers from a major inequality between male and female street names and we want to help fix this!

There are several ways to approach the inequality of street names and leverage a positive change in our society. Ours is with the use of Open Data. We want to use technologies to create a world where knowledge creates power for the many, not the few.

How do we plan to do this?

Several not-for-profits Open Knowledge Belgium, OpenStreetMap Belgium and Wikimedia Belgium are partnering up to build a map vizualizing the street names of Brussels by gender. To make this happen, we will use open data - data which can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose - from OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia.

And to do so, we need your help!

Although the data exist, we still need to link both data sources. During this event, we will add Wikidata tags (a tag containing all the information from a Wikipedia page) to the streets on OpenStreetMap. Linking this data will allow many possibilities such as using existing Wikipedia profiles as suggestions for cities or analysing what types of profiles are used for street names.

To be very clear: you don’t need to have a technical profile to join but rather the ambition to make a change. We’ll start the evening with a brief introduction about what needs to be done. By participating, you will contribute to OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and to a project that could easily be replicated in many cities across the world.