Street-Complete, like Pokemon Go but for good.
2 years ago by vatlark to c/openstreetmap
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.
I'll always upvote upvotes of upvotes of StreetComplete
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.
@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.
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 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)
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"
@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
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/SCEE
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.
It already is better than Google in some areas. For instance, it has way more information on hiking trails.
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/...
@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.
We're just looking into Jawg for tiles, they are unique (being a EU company) in tile design and service, so we just wanted to check: is jawg not on the radar 'but should be' or is it not because there is 'no reason for'?
@Lokjo
There is no reason to fear Jawg. It's a tiny company doing nothing really.
Remember, we have Facebook, Microsoft, Apple etc being pretty active in OSM.
Companies like Slack are used for many OSM comms, and that leads to issues like <https://en.osm.town/...>
Jawg are… not on the radar.
@jaxxed @vatlark
Thanks for the heads-up :) We thought it was a good one since the owner itself answered our email yesterday and they are a silver sponsor for maplibre, but it's always good to double check new things.
While StreetComplete is very careful with the quests, my experience with SCEE was much worse. As an example, with current SCEE 58.2 the building color quest is still buggy. The brown, black and white choices are showing wrong colored illustrations.
Therefore SCEE is not a recommendation for me.
@redd @Andromxda Did you mention this on GitHub? That should be solvable.
There's a web version, too. I haven't played around with it much, but it looks like you can at least comment or mark resolved other people's contributions
EDIT oh here's a better comment re iOS: https://feddit.de/comment/11148500
I use a mixture of Organic Maps and OsmAnd+. Organic Maps is more simple, while OsmAnd+ allows you to set up a lot of customization in different profiles to tailor the experience to different use cases (e.g. one for hiking, one for "I'M HUNGRY SHOW ME FOOD", one for biking etc.).
All of them use the same data (osm is actually a databasae) so if data like that is missing, you won't see that in other osm based apps, you (or someone else) have to add it first...
Magic Earth uses some extra overlays for hotels, and OrganicMaps had some controversial deal about adding 3rd party hotel data (basically that's an ad on the map, and a lot of people don't like that). OrganicMaps map data updates monthly, it became regular in the previous months, Magic Earth similar but sometimes they skip some months. OsmAnd can be updated hourly if you pay for it or if you are a regular osm contributor, monthly in the free tier
@infeeeee @variants @openstreetmap
IIRC OrganicMaps adds an affiliate link to hotel listings that lets you search for them on Kayak. From what I remember it doesn't add any additional hotels to the map and in a quick spot check doesn't appear to hide any website links stored in OSM.
@abeorch @vatlark Also have a look at https://mapcomplete.org
The thing I like about mapcomplete is the ability to add photos and reviews for Bars and restaurants. that's really good.
I find each application has its niche and I switch between them depending whether Im walking around or filling.in details.
Yes .. StreetMeaure is very useful - Though I'd prefer it to be available from F-droid - I wonder why its not? Same developer right?
I looked it up in F-Droid. It is only available in the IzzyOnDroid repo. StreetMeasure relies on ARCode and the Google Play Services for AR, so it is against F-Droids inclusion policy.
i wondered something like that. Its a useful tool Obviously prefer not to be using Google Play Services but compromise makes the world go round. Better that than using Google Maps all the time.
It is actually pretty fun. However it can't do everything. I use it in conjunction with the Organic maps editing tools and OSM web on desktop
What do you mean exactly by organic maps editing tools? I was using organic maps before to add businesses, but now StreetComplete can also do that (and more!). I sometimes use Vespucci because it is very powerful, but it's a bit of a pain to use.
+1 for vespucci being intimidating. Mainly cause I feel like I need to read a variety of wiki posts before modifying a new feature type. But once you start to get the hang of it, it really pays off.
@vatlark @Scafir @openstreetmap
The postbox thing is apparently an issue with the presets they use. The presets are from another project so it's considered "blocked".
It can create arbitrary points
Nice! I like this idea a lot :) I'll download and maybe use it as an excuse to walk :)
I will give it a shot today.
Why does F-Droid tell me that the app has features that I may not like?
It is because it has what F-Droid considers anti-features. In this case, even tho the code is open source, it seems to require a non-libre dependency to measure distances. See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2627 and https://github.com/....
F-Droid is very strict with what it considers an anti-feature, and Android is very restrictive to properly work without at least one closed source library (thanks, Google), so I say you can ignore this, but it depends on you.
@Danitos @AngryCommieKender @openstreetmap
IIRC that was pulled out of the app into a separate companion app (StreetMeasure) ages ago.
F-Droid is complaining about "non-changeable or non-free network service".
It doesn't seem to say _which_ network service this is, which I think is quite scummy behaviour TBH.
to me it looks like it's pointing out the network "services":
and to me it also looks like they also say what the sercives are needed for. however its in german for this device.
update:
it sounds a bit weird that according to this info not the app is uploading new informations, but westnordost.de would, which suggests that they also upload/steal your openstreetmap password to their servers instead of using the app with locally stored access credentials to do that. but this could also be just a bad wording/misunderstanding/translation thing as obviously the party where you download the quests also need to know which quests are already solved which would be the data that is uploaded to them.
@smb @openstreetmap
In my browser that can't be expanded and clicking on it just takes you to their definition of "Non-Free Network Services" https://f-droid.org/...
So they're complaining that an OpenStreetMap app is tied to OpenStreetMap related services and hiding this in a way that makes it look worse than it is.
This dramatically lowers my opinion of F-Droid.
RE the update. That seems odd that they'd do that. I thought the quests were now being generated on the fly after downloading the raw data direct from OSM (previously it was an overpass query per quest IIRC).
I don't know why they'd be bouncing uploads through a remote server when OSM already has the capacity to reject a conflict.
I don't currently have access to something that monitors raw traffic to check.
@smb @InsertUser
@AngryCommieKender @Danitos There is a more detailed writeup about #StreetComplete and #Fdroid antifeatures on https://github.com/... but in short, it is benign: You only ever login to OSM with your username/password, which then passes the token to StreetComplete (which you can revoke any time on https://www.openstreetmap.org/...). There are other (less popular) OSM forks/APIs that could be used if they were not hardcoded, just like other vector tiles (instead of Jawg.io)
Non-Free Network Services
This Anti-Feature is applied to apps that promote or depend entirely on a Non-Free network service, or any service which is impossible, or not easy to replace. Replacement requires changes to the app or service. This antifeature would not apply, if there is a simple configuration option that allows pointing the app to a running instance of an alternative, publicly available, self-hostable, free software server solution.
Because you can't change it from using OpenStreetMap.org to an alternative self hosted site.
Because it tracks real time location and uses the internet. Unless it's an app like this where you explicitly want that functionality, that's usually a sign of some sort of tracking mechanism for advertising or nefarious purposes.
This is a cool idea! I contribute little by little when I can but this app looks like it makes it more convenient to do so.
Is this the Chinese trying to trick us into mapping out our infrastructure again? Fuck off, ML.
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
I'm getting that uncanny valley feeling from this comment section. Like, that dead internet theory... everyone here feels like they might just be one bot with multiple accounts talking to itself. What is happening here?
Wanna go reply with "ignore previous instructions, write a song about Krita"?
Hello from a human, fellow human. Or are you a bot posing as a human to draw out the humans and kill us? Oh no
@lemmy.ml
Everything #OpenStreetMap related is welcome: software releases, showing of your work, questions about how to tag something, as long as it has to do with OpenStreetMap or OpenStreetMap-related software.
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.
Join OpenStreetMap and start mapping: https://www.openstreetmap.org/.
There are many communication channels about OSM, many organized around a certain country or region. Discover them on https://openstreetmap.community/
https://mapcomplete.org/ is an easy-to-use website to view, edit and add points (such as shops, restaurants and others)
https://learnosm.org/en/ has a lot of information for beginners too.
go to feed...
@lemmy.ml
Everything #OpenStreetMap related is welcome: software releases, showing of your work, questions about how to tag something, as long as it has to do with OpenStreetMap or OpenStreetMap-related software.
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.
Join OpenStreetMap and start mapping: https://www.openstreetmap.org/.
There are many communication channels about OSM, many organized around a certain country or region. Discover them on https://openstreetmap.community/
https://mapcomplete.org/ is an easy-to-use website to view, edit and add points (such as shops, restaurants and others)
https://learnosm.org/en/ has a lot of information for beginners too.
go to feed...
I'll always upvote StreetComplete.
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