# how to collect info: tips from mapmakers

## First of all, remember...

YOU are the one who chooses. Not a sponsor, not the municipality, not the entrepreneurs in your city, but you and your team.

Speaking of choosing: really choose. You don’t need to tip 15 places to have coffee. Travellers want to know the best ones. It might hurt sometimes, but kill your darlings!

When you write about them, be specific. Tell us about the one thing from the menu we should order, the one place in the park where we should lay down our blanket, the one word we should say to the bar owner.

Don’t feel you have to be complete. You don’t have to tell us everything on the menu, for example. Or name every single theme night. Pick and choose what you like! 

Combine! ‘Buy a sandwich here and go to the park there’, for example. Or: ‘this bar lets you bring your own food, go to this and this shop to buy this and this and have it with your beer’. This is really something only locals know.

## Meet the community: public events & street interviews

> We used to organise "carto party" in bars to ask people to vote for their favourite spots. We did it in different neighborhoods to have different points of views. Then we counted the votes and we decided if it was worth to be on the map or not. — *Marina, Lille*

> In Olsztyn & Warsaw we organized an event in bars or outdoor drinking areas. We stoped people and asked them to write their favourite places on the board / paper. After that we read them and saw how many repeat, and if we didn’t know them yet, we decided who will go and quality check it. — *Iga, Warsaw & Olsztyn*

> We simply use the vast knowledge of all team members : students, people on the streets, everybody they meet what they think should be on the map. — *Coen, Tilburg*

## Involving partners

> “Here in London we're planning a proper collab with an academic partner who’ll run a community event or workshop. They’re called LivingMaps Network based in King’s College London ([www.livingmaps.org/](http://www.livingmaps.org/)). They were founded by the late husband of the woman who published USE-IT London back in the 1970s!
>
> We’re adding the cost of the workshop coordinator and materials to our budget. From this collab we’re hoping to get insights we can put on the map, get local young people involved, and hopefully end up with an academic publication and plenty of public-engagement evidence we can use for future funding bids. — *Jonathan, London*

> Last times in Nijmegen we invited a focus group. One time including a stake holder so they could see our approach. After the focus group, the team divided the categories and looked what we thought was really important. So really a big mix from outsiders and the own team! — *Iris, Nijmegen*

## Easy to launch, hard to master: The online survey

> We just get together with the team and discuss it. We drop a form on social media and also ask some of the spots we put in the map what places they'd suggest, but quite often that would result in suggestions for expensive restaurants that are outside the backpackers' price range. — *Korneel, Bruges*

> In Erfurt, we originally wanted to engage with people at public events and tap into the team’s collective knowledge. Then COVID hit, and we switched entirely to the digital realm by launching a survey. Before that, we had already been following numerous local multipliers and institutions on our Instagram page, introducing the project, the team, and our favorite places in order to gain followers ahead of the survey.
>
> On Instagram, on different days, we posted illustrated questions such as “You have visitors. It’s raining. What do you do?”, “A good place for kissing,” or “This is where the party’s really at at night…”. We also offered all the questions together in an online survey. — *Theresa, Erfurt*

## The team knows

> All of the team members make a list of best places in their opinion, and then we assign other team members, who don't know the place, to quality check it and rate it. — *Iga, Warsaw & Olsztyn*

## Everybody's lovely nightmare: The massive spreadshit..

> We use Google spreadsheets to rate all the places we have gathered to go from a long list to a short list. Then we discuss it in team meetings if we really agree with the choices. If the rating is contradictory or people disagree on things, we pitch why it should or shouldn’t be included. Also once we start writing and nobody feels like writing for a particular place or it is not catchy enough, we might drop it after all. — *Coen, Tilburg*

> We collected all responses in a doc, calculated their weighting, and sorted them into categories (culture, gastronomy, nature, nightlife, …). Through very long team discussions, we gradually narrowed down the selection. — *Theresa, Erfurt*


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