Come edit my map: why projects should welcome external contributions
🗺️ Space Invaders in Berlin come to my email inbox; the simplest process for external contributions; leave the window for serendipitous collaborations wide open
Last week I got an email I was waiting for.
It contained a list of 👾 Space Invader mosaics in Berlin. It was the first external contribution to my project of mapping the 4000 pieces of Invader street art strewn across Europe and beyond:
The backend is a CSV file
The map is based on a simple text file in the CSV format (comma-separated text file). It’s storing all the information about the already mapped mosaics, one row per piece:
I also have a Jupyter notebook with a bunch of scripts that help manage this data. One of the scripts converts the CSV file to the web format that I publish on the website.
Contributions inbox
There are many ways this project could take external contributions:
💬 directly in the UI → I could add a pop-up visible upon a right-click / long-press on the map with “Suggest a missing invader” dialog. But I didn't know if the project would catch on, so all this work seemed premature.
🐱 via GitHub → I could put the CSV file on GitHub and ask contributors to send me a pull request. But this would limit the appeal to people already familiar with GitHub, and I wanted it to be approachable to anyone.
With this in mind, I went for the simplest mechanism I could think of: publish the format of my CSV file, and note on the website that contributions are welcome via good old-fashioned email.
The entire “process” is literally just a few paragraphs of text and a screenshot
Why welcome contributions
It's important to me that my projects, even toy projects, welcome external contributions. But this is *not* for the obvious utilitarian benefit of scaling the work on the project. Sure, if you have 4000 Space Invader mosaics to map, it will go faster if you share the work.
But accepting contributions is important for another reason: because it provides clear signal that the project is truly useful. For a commercial project, the users are vouching for its usefulness with their money. For a free-to-use project, the external contributions are the feedback loop I rely on to see if the project makes sense.
It's also so much more fun to do something together, than to go alone. Leaving the window for contributions wide open creates space for serendipity and unlikely collaborations. Hopefully more on this in a future edition :).
More on this
📝 Simple lasts longer. Simple projects are easier to maintain and so they tend to last longer, even as our interests in them ebbs and wanes.
📝 Paint it black. Context on the Space Invader map project.
In other news
🎙️ OpenAI demoed their latest voice synthesis model. As the models and access to them improves, we should all presume any voice we hear over the phone/internet can be fake. Some spectacular scams and heists will likely follow. Ben Evans: Tell your family, and tell your corporate treasury department.
🎨 You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. (tweet)
⛑️ Traveling Colonels, the 2-person operation building first aid kits for the frontlines in Kiev (I visited them back in October) published their latest newsletter and set up a new fundraiser. They are who they say they are and they do what they say they do 💫 → 100% of the donations goes to first aid materials, they cover travel expenses out of pocket.
Postcard from Paris
The final attraction of the Invader Space Station exhibition in Paris: the giant mosaic on what used to be the terrasse of the famous left-leaning newspaper “Libération".
Wishing myself and you all good collaborations this week :),
– Przemek