Crowdsourcing a library of favorite places

What are the coolest, discovered or undiscovered places locally and around the world that will inspire what our neighborhood and cities will look like in the near future? The answer partly lies in our collective experiences. Under development for a year now, a site for crowdsourcing the best of those experiences is finally up at Cooltown Places. See the Cooltown Places button at the top right of this site.

The mission? “Crowdsource a library of favorite places from around the world to inspire crowdsourcing new ones in your community!” Cooltown Places is a free public site to crowdsource profiles of the best places (e.g. a coffeehouse, building, street, piazza, neighborhood) around the world. The first hundred places, culled from this site, have been entered, categorized in ‘does exist’, ‘will exist’, and ‘should exist’. The best part is that the most viewed and the highest rated entries are the ones that show up first on the site, so the crowd decides which of the eventual hundreds of places should get the most exposure.

The goal is to have a much better understanding of what kinds of places we should apply crowdsourced placemaking to in order to transform the places that should exist into the places that do exist.

It’s in the first phase, so search, edit, videos, etc. will come later.

The newly opened corresponding Facebook Page is here (where you can ask technical questions, suggest features), and you can follow via Twitter here.

As an incentive, the most popular entry at the end of June will receive a free crowdsourced placemaking analysis for local implementation, if they so choose to receive it.

It’d be great to learn about those special places that you’ve long felt more people should experience. Isn’t that what placemaking is all about?

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neilkt