What are the mission and defining features of StreetComplete?

[smichel17]

I can see three goals:

• Growing the number of OSM contributors.
• Introducing those contributors to the community / helping them get more involved.
• Increasing the number of OSM contributions — more complete & better quality map data

They are closely related — more contributors produce more contributions; people who are more involved in the OSM community are likely to make higher numbers of contributions; people who contribute more often are more likely to get involved and involve their friends; etc.

@westnordost is that also how you see it? So then, in #2461 (comment),

StreetComplete is not defined by its quests, it's defined by its ease of use.

I think the logic goes something like: "Sometimes @smichel17 feels the motivation to improve the OSM data in some area. The easier SC is to use, the more likely he is to act on it and go mapping."

From this perspective, #2461 is a great feature. I particularly would have appreciated it when I was first starting, to complete all navigation-related information in a given area.

I've said this before, but personally I do not have a desire to get involved in what I might describe as the politics of OSM. To me it's a hobby, not my calling. I am ethically aligned with the project, and I care about it… as an end user. I don't care about the data model (nodes, ways, relations — whatever), nor what tagging schema the community decides on. I may chime in on these issues occasionally, but that's because they're interesting problems, not because I'm invested in the outcome. I just want to be able to avoid Google Maps (et al) without sacrificing too much functionality.

I started mapping because I was not satisfied with the quality of address data & wanted to improve it for my own use. I used StreetComplete because of the low barrier to entry — it was the only app that did not require me to read up on OSM in order to contribute. Even so, it took a couple tries before I really started using SC and completed more than a handful of quests. So, I do think features like #2461, that would make it even easier to fill out all the address data for a given area, would make a difference in terms of how many people use SC more than once or twice.

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My perspective is a little different.

These days, I use StreetComplete more for personal fitness, like "Pokemon Go for OSM". It helps give my walks a little more purpose and keep me motivated to continue going on them. I can set a goal to go on a walk and complete 200 quests, which brings meaning to an individual walk that's hard to find in the health benefits alone. So to me, quests and stars actually are what define StreetComplete. In other words, I am motivated more often by the activity of mapping (doing something good while being active) than by my desire to enter specific data.

That is, while ease of use is a requirement for me to use the app at all, it's really SC's ease of goal-setting (I want to answer that quest or this many quests) that get me to use it as often as I have. (In fairness, it is still not that much, ~2200 quests over maybe 20-30 walks in total… but it still puts me at rank 741 globally / 54 in the US).

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For the record, I still support your pursuit of #2461 — even if the UI doesn't work out or there is not time to implement it, the architecture work will still be useful for other features.