I first learned of Street-Complete here and I really like it.
It’s satisfying to walk around, complete little tasks, and get prizes, scratching a similar itch to Pokemon Go.
Stuck waiting for someone? Add opening hours for a few local businesses.
Have a long walk ahead of you? See if you can add/check house addresses as fast as you can walk.
Want to walk off a few beers before heading home? Complete some tasks in the bar street.
Its a very constructive way to “be right” on the internet.
This is the most fun app in the world. I hope they keep building on top of this, it’s amazing! Plus, being able to see new “quests” popup as you edit on OSM/edit? Amazing!!
If there was some way for the app to create teams trying to fill out details like in Pokemon Go, that would be crazy exciting. Would be difficult to balance that so it didn’t incentivize adding junk… Maybe having a third party keeping players in check? Not sure, but the possibility is tantalizing!
@inbeesee @openstreetmap It does have a team mode, but I think that’s just a transient thing.
@InsertUser @inbeesee the team mode just makes sure 2 people don’t gets asked the same thing. Otherwise it’s wasted work
Would be cool to expand it! Is it open sourced work?
@inbeesee I’m pretty sure all of Street complete is open source. The team mode is a very clever hack, where each person gets a different number and it’s just showing people different quests
Interesting… If you tracked groups by “different quest number” you could potentially group them that way… Even more hacky lol
I’ll always upvote StreetComplete.
I’ll always upvote upvotes of StreetComplete
I’ll always upvote upvotes of upvotes of StreetComplete
I’ll always upvote.
Yes, the gamification elements they’ve been adding lately are brilliant. I was really impressed when I first saw that. Really need to open the app more often…
I don’t like the implication that Pokémon GO was bad when it got a ton of people to go outside and interact with each other. This is cool too though.
That’s a great point. I probably could have worded that differently.
@RealFknNito @vatlark @openstreetmap
It caused a lot of fake stuff to be added to OSM even though its update frequency was slow enough that very little of the fake stuff actually made it into Pokemon Go.
I think it did bring in a few good mappers too though so it wasn’t all bad.
It wasn’t bad. Now. It is.
This does not. Make. Any sense.
Time exists. Things change over time. Shocking revelation I know
It was unique time and experience at its peak. People moved on largely and if something as big and addicting as Pokémon couldn’t permanently make it popular then nothing will
It will come back however in different form as the miniaturisation of VR headsets progresses and whenever it will be cool and comfortable to walk in one
Walking with eyes glued to phone gets old real quick and can fucking kill you hence no matter how good game is this formula is dead. Many Darwin awards were handed out. My friend received one and another got just a nomination
I know the E word is getting old here but I’ll say that “product degradation” occured for the reasons of increased revenue which was not for consumer benefit
I think they were complaining about the random punctuation.
I love this app so much, also if you really get into it go to the open street map website and draw buildings, roads, etc to add missing places or update changes.
I cleared my whole walkable area of questions then added all the houses and it populates new questions about house number, shop name, etc which I then went and filled out while walking round. In the zone around me the open source map is now by far the best free to access map, Google house numbers are completely random and no where has upto data shops.
There’s also a lot of cool projects devoted to mapping under-served areas, especially in regions where aid workers need information or natural disasters have changed landscapes. You draw in roads, towns, farms, etc based on areal imagery.
Just submitted a first update. Yay dopamine.
The open source community can thank me later. I’ll take a banquet and a linux distro named after me thanks.
(Seriously this seems fun - thanks for posting about it)
I love this app, found it a bit ago on F-Droid. I’m moving to a very rural town up north and there’s nearly nothing done there. Very excited to get up there and start working on it.
every time i find myself in a rural town, i go out for a walk with streetComplete. I’m often the first mapper of those areas and it’s a pleasure to complete the map and see your entries on the updates a couple of weeks later. next time you’re there, you have a detailed map of the area available and you know why :)
Explaining your OSM addiction to friends and family is a little harder. “I just need to spend the entire day mapping”
“don’t wait for me, keep walking. i have to answer these questions”
😅
@VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works had a great idea in their comment above - fill in what you can, then use OSM to add missing buildings etc. They explain it better here though
!https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12811829
StreetComplete is godsend. Editing OSM in JOSM, iD, etc, is not trivial and involves reading a lot of documentation and forum posts (if you care to do things right), which of course isn’t anywhere near practical for small devices when you’re on the go, surveying.
This app changed my whole routine. The interface is really solid and helps the community target important tasks, rewarding it with little prizes. Althewhile, the gamification is kept at a very healthy level, to avoid attracting leaderboard seekers and whatnot, which would certainly lower the quality of contributions.
I think the contribution day grid (akin to GitHub’s thing) as well as the dynamic category explorer, the badges and the OSM-related projects it reveals to you bit by bit really bring everything together. It’s an incredible tool!
For the experienced (and this is not said lightly), there is the expert version, which adds more advanced editing features for those looking for a bit more control in regular SC.
I tried it when someone posted about it a couple of weeks ago. It is fun, my son and I go for walks and I include him in the tasks. Unfortunately, we get a lot of road surface questions which are a bit boring.
You can also add “little” objects like benches, recycling containers or trees in your near environment to the map that come with their own sets of questions
@stiephelando @vatlark @openstreetmap
If a question type gets tedious you can disable that “quest” in the settings.
If a question type gets tedious you can disable that “quest” in the settings.
That improved my experience. I disabled the things that my city generally doesn’t have, and it made my questing much more enjoyable.
If I disable the 3 types of quest I get in my area (road surface, lanes, power pole type) then I get basically no quests, period
I’ve taken to adding buildings that I’m surprised they didn’t already have on OSM and then filling in the quests that auto-populate with that, but its meh
Have you looked at all the different layers? A while back they added more of those, with different types of quests that don’t appear normally.
Iirc, you can deselect road surfaces in the settings somewhere so the app doesn’t ask about it?
Yea but somebody gotta add that info ;)
Same here!
The road surfaces actually help a ton for apps that come up with bicycle routes as well as those on wheelchairs. However of you’d prefer less of them, you can make jt a lower priority in the settings.
When first reading (or not actually reading) this post, I thought “What’s the task? Go to the local bar and drink a beer, then enter the museum and scan a QR code to prove, you are there…”
But then, I realized what it’s actually about: Collecting information to show others in OpenStreetMap, like “does the bus stop have a trash bin? Or what kind of asphalt does the street have?”
I think, I’ll try this out tomorrow. Thanks!
Friendly PSA that there is also StreetComplete ExpertEdition (on F-Droid only) which has more tasks and crucially allows you to directly edit tags. Very recommended if you know what you’re doing and have some more familiarity with OSM.
https://github.com/Helium314/SCEEOh, this is interesting. I’m not the most advanced OSM user, but I’ll definitely take a look at this and learn.
StreetComplete to the polls
iOS version is in the works but there’s something similiar online too.
@MonkderDritte @vatlark @openstreetmap
@MapComplete is only similar in that it is aimed at giving simple tailored forms to new users. It does not make it easy to contribute “all the low hanging fruit closest to me”.
I’ll recommend this to my wife who plays Pikmin Go religiously.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion, it’s quite fun and I’d love a future where OpenStreetMap data is exaustive
It already is better than Google in some areas. For instance, it has way more information on hiking trails.
Pretty sure they’re used for RideGPS, too.
Fdroid says that it is bound to jawg.io for tiles. What are the chances that we are giving our data to a company who will take it away from us, or is just using us for free labour?
It is free labor. However it benefits us all and there isn’t any alternatives. I don’t think OSM is going anywhere soon. It is has benefits for any people and industries.
Fun fact OSM has had lots of issues with hostile take overs. They now have a dedicated committee on the subject https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Special_Committee_on_Takeover_Protection
@jaxxed @vatlark @openstreetmap
Very slim. But their privacy policies are online if you’re concerned.You free labour all goes to the OpenStreetMap database licensed under the Open DataBase License.
Yes, you link your OSM account to StreetComplete and it adds your contributions via your OSM account. Same with Vespucci.
When you log into OSM you can see all the contributions pushed by StreetComplete.
or is just using us for free labour?
It pushes updates to openstreetmap.
