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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