2026-08-28 –, Tahiti Language: Français
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observation is regularly clouded by contradictory Clue cards: an official sign versus a local resident's testimony, an outdated database entry versus a recent photo.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.
tags, board game, cooperative play
Workshop requirements:X
Contributrice bretonne depuis 2018, je participe aux rencontres brestoises et prends plaisir à enrichir OpenStreetMap.
À travers mon travail en médiathèque, j’ai eu envie de faire découvrir la cartographie libre à un public plus large, en menant des projets concrets et collaboratifs. Aujourd’hui, je suis ravie de partager cette expérience avec vous et d’échanger sur la place d’OSM comme outil de médiation culturelle et patrimoniale.