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MapSwipe, by Ivan Gayton, Pim de Witte, Sadok Rabadan, Alison Malouf, and Pete Masters — Map the world's most vulnerable people in your spare time
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Feels great to contribute like this! I think the zoom needs improvement. Sometimes my fingers are in the way of seeing the zoompopup. Maybe if it stayed until I click again. It would also be nice with a quick button to mark all 6 tiles as cloud. I had clouds in a full session and it was a lot of clicking 😄 Love the app, good work!
AWESOME idea. Did you think about turning this into a game? Now, I'm not a game guy but I'm in a train now and looks like people gotta catch them all. The possibilities are endless but here's my shot at it.
It would be a strategic/fighting game. People can setup their tribe in any place and be assigned some amount of people from a given place (preferably with some skills specific to the place). They can also use resources characteristic to the place. The goal would be to fight with other tribes and basically develop your own like in any game. It would be more real though. Now in order to fight with someone you have to reach them through a road you explore (on a map) and if your opponent knows the road they can see you but if they don't then they cannot and you can surprise them.
You get the idea. Sorry for being chaotic but T-1 from getting of the train.
@beckerjs Oh, thanks. Well, I guess it's self explanatory. Do you have any specific questions?
I would like the game to be more than badges and XP. However harsh it sounds, I don't think that building an experience around good will is scalable.
@wokalski hey, so we built mapswipe around the simplicity of swiping and tapping, and not having to think too intensively about what you're doing. For that reason I think in the current project your idea might not work, but it's definitely something to consider for the future. With regards to the other comments - we are adding things like leaderboards, maybe groups, and the end game is actual rewards for the best mappers.
@pimdewitte Thanks for the reply! Even though I don't fully agree, I get your point. What's more, such project would be a huge investment.
What's your estimate, how much time spent in the app (in general) do you need to cover whatever you want to cover?
@wokalski yep. Time wise it would take a while also. Part of this project was also an api so that other people can find other ways to get people to contribute with the same tiles. If you're at all interested I can give you access to it when it goes live. And what do you mean by what's your estimate? Currently users are spending on average 20 minutes a day inside mapswipe.
@pimdewitte As I understand it, the goal is to cover some part of the world. Or ultimately all the uncovered parts. I'm wondering how much time is needed to do this?
Hey guys! Pim here, I'm the lead developer and PM on Mapswipe. We built mapswipe so that you can effectively utilize the times where you are not doing anything else, and turn it into something that helps save lives. Our vision is to replace the "candy crush time" and turn it into "mapswipe time". I personally do it while I watch TV, commute to work, or just relax. The project was released a few weeks ago, and more than 3 MILLION contributions have already been made by volunteers like yourself.
So mapswipe, which was made as part of the Missing Maps Project is basically a crowdsourcing effort between Doctors without Borders, The Red Cross, and a whole bunch of other NGOs to map the bottom billion people in this world. Believe it or not - there are no good maps of some of the most vulnerable places in the world, which makes it incredibly hard for medical and logistical teams to respond to humanitarian crises. These maps help save lives!
We then turn the contributions in maps like these:
http://imgur.com/a/tmyuv
Here is our Project Manager (Ivan) talking about why the project is important. Ivan has more than 10 years with doctors without borders and I personally think he's a real-life hero (though he would never say so himself):
And here are some other links that can help you understand how urgent important your work is!
https://twitter.com/TheMissingMa...
https://twitter.com/bluestarfish...
https://twitter.com/TheMissingMa...
If you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out.
@think_andreah Thanks so much! There is also a whole tech group at the American Red Cross dedicated to mapping. I've been collaborating with them for a while and they are awesome too.
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