StreetComplete was designed by Tobias Zwick and launched in 2016 as a handy “low-bar entry” field capturing application for OpenStreetMap. In the following 2-3 years it rapidly rose to have a share of 3.9% of contributors favoured application, since it requires no real prior expertise in OpenStreetMap. The beauty of it is that it exploits the opportunity of a mapper being in situ where some features have been mapped, but lack details about their attributes, and tags on the OpenStreetMap database.

The UX is good, even for the experienced mapper it masterfully detects the absence {not to jump down a rabbit hole, but very like my favourite Pink Floyd Album } of tagging details, and then it supports the insertion of the correct tags with menu systems that are visual rather than everything being list driven. Perfect for being on the move, a car passenger or a leisurely walker. This is not supposed to be a review of the app, but you can probably detect that I am a fan.

With some help from my friend Amanda who downloaded the .pbf, and extracted all the editor traces of StreetComplete here I was able to get hold of a csv of all of the Ireland edits and then use that to make a heatmap, with some help from RustyB. The heatmap shows, what we would expect, greater use of the app in Ireland’s cities and large towns.

However, my expectations of the number of StreetComplete contributors, and the number of edits contributed in total were higher, and it was disappointing to learn that after five years was only 108,500 edits, and this done by 105 different contributors meaning an average of only 1,000 each. On the other hand, and typical of OpenStreetMap contribution statistics, there is a “long-tail” of contributions, where the vast majority are small contributions and 80% of the work is done by the top 10 users.

User	Edits
cart0	26878
ag-nius	11627
DaCor	10555
DeBigC	8612
b-unicycling	7628
Florent Ch	4024
tshedy	3531
kenguest	3105
Dr Breandán Anraoi MacGabhann	1627
desfitzgerald	1428

Being very involved in the #osmIRL_buildings project I found that the app works in the perfect context to help tag newly added buildings, where we are still using satellite imagery to capture buildings it is unavoidable that some high percentage of them will be building=yes. Looking deeper into into the extracted data is was interesting to discover that the objectives of #osmIRL_buildings were relevant to what a lot of StreetComplete activity was focused upon, with the following findings:

• 23,221 edits related to the “building” value key
• 24,773 edits were to define a roof type, or levels within the roof
• 15,163 edits were to add the building levels
• 6,887 edits related to adding the address in either house number or housename
• 3,559 edits related to the addition of a placename or streetname to a building address

Overall I think StreetComplete is a useful and very handy tool, but I do think the Ireland OpenStreetMap community could embrace it more. In particular there are 700,000 or more building=yes tags on the island, and this challenge needs to be addressed to get towards a useful and scalable building dataset. More StreetComplete surveyors doing more walks and cycles, and contributions into the black fog of absent attributes is needed in the future.