Carto'Mission: Bringing Participatory Mapping Off-Screen Through Cooperative Play

Room: Workshops I - Amphi Navier or Picard (Carnot)

Friday, 16:45
Duration: 60 minutes (plus Q&A)

Language: fr

This event will not be recorded.

• Coralie Le Bian

How do we turn a one-day contributor — someone introduced to OSM at a mapathon, an outreach booth or an awareness event — into a mapper who keeps contributing over time?

Carto’Mission is a fully cooperative board game designed to address precisely this retention challenge. Around a printed board representing a small section of a city, players take on the role of a team of mapping agents tasked with verifying, correcting and completing geographic data. But Carto’Mission is more than a game: it is a non-digital mediation device that simulates the peer-review process at the heart of OpenStreetMap, and serves as a pedagogical springboard toward real-world use of tools like StreetComplete and iD.

This talk offers a hands-on report on the design, facilitation and deployment of the game, along with the lessons learned from our first field experiences.

Open geographic data fuels an ever-growing number of territories, public services and citizen-led initiatives. Yet the OpenStreetMap community faces a structural challenge that is rarely named openly: sustained engagement. How do we make sure that someone introduced to OSM at a one-off event doesn’t stop after that first experience? How do we turn curiosity into a regular practice?

To address this, we created Carto’Mission, a cooperative board game that makes tangible — through hands-on observation, manipulation and debate — what a contributory geographic database actually is. The goal is straightforward: demystify OSM and give players the confidence they need to start contributing on their own.

Inspired by StreetComplete and iD, the game is played around a printed board (currently a 5×5 grid of square tiles, with a future evolution toward modular hexagonal tiles under consideration). Players cooperate as a team of mapping agents to complete observation and validation missions, supported by a three-tier pedagogical progression:

• Junior — Observation: map-reading and simple visual observation, with no technical vocabulary.

• Intermediate — Initiation: introduction to the key = value logic, using French-translated tags (e.g. amenagement = banc).

• Expert — Contribution: real international OSM tags (e.g. wheelchair=yes) applied to deliberately ambiguous situations.

The pedagogical core of the game lies in its debate mechanic. Visual observation is regularly clouded by contradictory Clue cards: an official sign versus a local resident’s testimony, an outdated database entry versus a recent photo. The team must argue, cross-check and reach consensus before validating the data (Green token), correcting it (Yellow token) or leaving a note for a field survey (Orange token).

By replicating the very peer-verification processes that make OSM data robust, Carto’Mission lets players experience from the inside what contributing to a digital commons actually means. Players don’t just learn what a tag is: they live through doubt, deliberation and the responsibility of a contributor. By the end of a game, they have the vocabulary, the reflexes and — most importantly — the felt legitimacy to open StreetComplete the very next day and start mapping their own neighbourhood.