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Many of the mobile editing tools are aimed at the more experienced end of the spectrum. The online tools are almost universally aimed at the full editing experience. I think however there’s a lot of value that can be extracted with the right questions; in a much more constrained use case.

For example, Foursquare will encourage users to rate attributes of a place they’ve checked into, like “Is X good for lunch?”

We’ve got similar small focus editors - things like http://ae.osmsurround.org/ae/index - but we really lack any idea of “does the user know much about the place to answer questions?”

https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/users/checkins does give us one means to ask for this; as did previous versions of the facebook API - I’m not entirely clear now that posts being tagged with ‘locations’ would allow you to understand a similar kind of relationship.

http://openbeermap.github.io/ almost perfectly describes the kind of experience I’d interested in - it has a lot of domain specific knowledge and guides the user into authoring the brewery tag correctly; ditto http://openwheelmap.org/ - both could be tremendously made more useful if coupled with user history and focused data enhancement tools.

Discussion

Comment from mvexel on 20 September 2015 at 21:02

OpenGeoQuestions should be interesting for this!

Comment from CloCkWeRX on 21 September 2015 at 04:31

I hadn’t seen that I don’t think, but in the exact right direction! Wonder if the source is avail; demo isn’t too working for me right now.

Comment from Harry Wood on 21 September 2015 at 10:33

The Kort game http://play.kort.ch is designed to be asking various simple questions. Maybe it could do with some more interesting questions related restaurants and pubs (making it more foursquare-like) For me it’s just asking relatively uninteresting questions about name language settings on things and names of service roads, so some questions about extra POI tagging might liven it up a bit.

Of course WheelMap http://wheelmap.org/en/ is everybody’s favourite example of an nice narrow focussed tagging app. Essentially it’s asking one question… “how’s the wheelchair access?”.

Likewise coffeedex https://www.mapbox.com/blog/coffeedex/ just asking “how much does coffee cost?”

onosm http://onosm.org is for adding new things to OpenStreetMap, so not really the foursquare-like thing you’re describing, but a simple tool with a constrained set of fields.

Comment from CloCkWeRX on 21 September 2015 at 12:04

Kort I hadn’t seen; it would be tempting to fork that an expand the story as to why you do the missions. It’s map-first like wheelmap.org is; but does reasonably well based on your current location to ask questions. I agree - it’d be good to add more interesting questions; I don’t really feel thrilled to be classifying track types. I might have a look at what’s possible there.

Re why you do the missions; you could imagine something like “Spooks” from Charles Stross’ Halting State working as an augmented reality game - a bit of work doing a backstory that you are an industrial spy/secret shopper “gathering intel” on businesses or similar; and missions to document 3 business of the same type with X attributes. Obviously don’t want to get people arrested for sneaking around; but with the right balance… Google’s now spun off game I never quite bought into, though I know many who have (and there’s a high overlap with geocaching in my circle of friends who played that).

That said, I think it’d be trickier than the opengeoquestions approach combined with knowing how to target people based on checkin/location history.

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