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The original notion of volunteered geographical information (VGI) offers a vision of democratizing geographical information systems (GIS) via the contributions of non-expert individuals, replacing authoritative episetemologies with more open and local geographical representations. Recent studies have questioned this vision, with empirical and conceptual investigations pointing to the effects of data production procedures on the resulting representation. In practice, many organizations and social institutions hold important roles in the production of VGI, thus integrating institutional epistemologies into VGI. This paper explores the role of such institutions in the production of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data by identifying and analysing large-scale contribution events, such as data imports or organized mapping efforts. The paper deploys a global event-identification query on the historical OSM database. The results show that large-scale events are responsible for a significant portion of OSM activities, especially in relation to the creation of data. The procedure identifies several event hotspots, prevalent in either highly developed regions or developing ones. Characterizing the events according to the institutional context that drives them, the paper suggests a relation between socio-economic contexts and the integration of specific institutional perspective into local representations. Hence, the paper contributes to our understanding of VGI as a product of complex interactions of social and institutional perspectives and offers a method towards considering these in research and practice.