Hear me out:
OpenStreetMap on Steam!
What!?
You know those physical coloring books for adults people where buying? You know those games where all you do is click on hidden cats? You know Powerwash simulator? Organizing games? Assemble with care? Dorf Romantik?
A lot of people like very simple games where you just look for things and follow extremely simple instructions. Steam are full of them already. Why not one where the instructions you follow actually helps out in the real world?
I've often told people that editing OSM is like a game to me. There's a photo, and I follow the lines on the photo. When I first start drawing along the lines, I can end up doing it for a long time, and get just as much out of it as when I go just one more turn in Civ. Just one more line! One more dot.
Ok, ok, I know what you're going to say: Letting lose a bunch of gamer kids with no mapping experience who doesn't care about OSM on the OSM data might not be such a good idea.
Here's my proposal:
- Only add the data to OSM after X people have drawn the same thing
- Limit the inputs to the most basic stuff: Roads, rivers, buildings, etc
- Maybe after X hours of "play" they can unlock more advanced stuff
- Limit the places they can map to the most unmapped areas of the world
There are wast swaths of the world that has no or minimal data in OSM, and where there are very few types of things to map – that is, areas that needs a lot of time, but not much expertise.
See for example this random area of Madagascar that I've spent some time on. There are a few rivers, some farmland, a town and just a ton of roads. Even if a OSM game only allowed people to add roads, that could be huge boost to this area, and millions of square km like it around the world.
I some times use the app MapSwipe as a sort of a game. It shows you small parts of the world, and your job is to mark the areas where there are buildings or roads. This is the first step in mapping new areas, and the marked areas are later looked over by people who actually add the correct data into OSM.
MapSwipe do not rely on a single report. Multiple people have to mark the same area before it's sent to the people who will map the area.
Something similar could be done with OSM on Steam: A number of people would have to draw the same lines for the veracity to be accepted and the data added. Sure, this is much harder for actual mapping data than just for "here's an area where there's something to map". People will draw different lines. But as long as they're relatively similar we can assume the things are really there, and then an AI thingy could draw the average lines and add them to OSM.
I'm not saying it would be easy to implement. And I don't really think anyone will actually do it.
I'm just saying that with the number of people playing games on Steam, and the number of hours they spend! And also the willingness to pay money. This could be a huge boost for mapping of unmapped areas of the world, and even maybe an income stream, or at least pay for itself.
Hey, just a thought!
@forteller have you ever tried StreetComplete? It exists already
@clairev Yes, I've used SC quite extensively (#4 in Norway), and yes, it is a kind of gamification of OSM, but it's very far from what I'm proposing. Physically going out to add more info about existing nodes and sitting on a PC drawing new lines are quite different experiences :)
@forteller So something like Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders, but with maps. (Years ago I enjoyed reading single pages of books while fixing their OCR.)
I never considered that mapping can be done remotely; all my OSM contributions (nearly always via StreetComplete) are from places I visited. But there are so many people elsewhere who could map these from publicly available data.
I like the idea.