[OSM-talk] Open sourcing of POI pictures for OSM App/STAPPZ - Feedback and ideas wanted

[Tim Frey]

Greetings OSM community,

 

my name is Tim and I’m one of the creators of the STAPPZ app. We want feedback from the community about our open sourcing plan of the STAPPZ app content.

 

What is STAPPZ: 

STAPPZ is in short an app and a server backend application. The original idea was to create crowdsourced version of an insider travel guide, where each user can contribute content.

That means, you open the app and you post some pictures and a text at a geolocation and when you are online, then the content is uploaded to the server and is available on a webmap. This way, you can create a personal travel diary map. Our original plan was to extend STAPPZ step by step to create not only travel guides, but to also add pictures of POIs

Example: https://maps.stappz.com/region/sicilia 

Android App demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDBh-VrU2Ig 

Explanation slides: https://de.slideshare.net/TimFrey2/travel-guides-are-old-news-being-a-local-insider-everywhere-is-today 

Background:

We managed to get featured with the app at conferences and in a lot of magazines (e.g. Computer Bild, Chip) and got over 10k downloads for Android, but, frankly speaking, we did not get mass adaption to create a sustainable ecosystem. Therefore, we as company had to focus on other projects to earn money for living ☹ . 

 

Feedback wanted:

We poured a lot of our personal tears and sweat in coding and marketing STAPPZ and today we think that STAPPZ could be used to create picture POI content for OSM. We see that need in special, because google maps is offering more and more picture POI content from users, and I, personally, do not know such an open datapod for open streetmap.

Out of this, we consider, heavily, to “open source” the licensing of the user created STAPPZ content for the OSM community. In addition, we also consider to open source the backend of STAPPZ and the IOS and Android app to make a community project out of it. However, we are a very small company and we cannot do that completely alone, we will need help and advice from the community. 

 

Technical details:

Internally, in the app and the backend, we use only OSM data and maps to ensure not being bound to legal contracts to google. The Android version is far more developed than the IOS version and has complete offline and caching functionality to allow posting of pictures form the gallery and to position the pictures on a map. Currently, the maps part of the app does not work for Android, but we want to enable it as soon as we have time. 

STAPPZ supports gallery uploads with exif data, cached content and many more things – if you got questions please ask.

 

Questions to the community:

What do you think about open sourcing the content, the app and so on? Do you see a value added for the OSM community?
Would you support the project to open source it?

Do you know companies who would be interested in participating? We are open for collaborations here.

Do you have own thoughts and points about it? 

 

I’d really like to learn more here. STAPPZ is a really personal baby for us, and we’d like that it continues to live. 

 

Thanks a lot for everyone in advance who reads that – and even more thanks to the ones who are going to reply with feedback and thoughts.

Even if you just think the idea is good or bad – please tell us that we get a picture how the whole community sees it.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards

Tim Frey

 

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