StreetComplete turns OpenStreetMap gaps into bite-sized on-site quests

StreetComplete is a mobile surveyor app that lowers the barrier to contributing to OpenStreetMap. Rather than requiring users to learn a full-featured map editor, it scans for missing data near the user’s location and surfaces each gap as a simple ‘quest’ plotted on the map.

Each quest reduces a data-collection task to a single, concrete question that a contributor answers while physically standing at the location. The responses are written straight into OpenStreetMap under the user’s own account, so there is no intermediate editing step or separate tooling to master.

The design targets the crowdsourced-mapping bottleneck: keeping map data accurate and complete depends on many casual contributors, and most editors are too complex for that audience. By gamifying small, verifiable field observations, StreetComplete makes routine map maintenance approachable for non-experts.