Koprollers, we’re happy to introduce our biggest feature in the last few months. You’ve been able to suggest new places into Koprol, and wait for our approval. Now you can approve them yourself! Yes, we are giving the power to manage Koprol’s places to special users called Kurators.

Koprol is about verified places
Adding places is easy, but we don’t want to give you duplicates and bogus venues. We want valid places so it's easier to discover people around you. Now when places are being added, the Kurators collectively verify and edit them. This ensures you get better choice of places to check in to. What's fun, on each new place you can see who is responsible for creating and approving it.

Sample place page: hey, who approved this?

Become a Kurator
Anyone can be a Kurator. All you need to do is add new places and get enough of them approved by current Kurators. Once you reach a certain threshold you automatically become a Kurator and be able to verify new places. If you are successful at verifying, eventually you'll get to the next level and be able to edit the map and information of those new places.

Sample verification page: so is this a valid place?

Secret Formula
Users have different levels of privileges based on a secret algorithm that studies the quality of their activities like adding places, verifying places, writing reviews, etc. Those who get approved a lot and verify correctly will get more access to editing. Meanwhile, people who add invalid places and verify incorrectly will eventually be demoted down. The algorithm will be tweaked from week to week to get the best formula and award your contributions.

Add any place in the world!
One more good news. We used to have only 200 cities in Koprol, right? Well now you can add to any city in the world. Thanks to Yahoo! Geo Technologies, you can find millions of places in the world, including specific neighborhoods, and add specific venues.

Discover new & interesting places
The combination of Yahoo! Geo Technologies and our Kurator system is another big step in the direction of our mission to help people discover and share interesting places in the world. Go try it now! Search a place on Koprol. If we don’t have it you will see an ‘Add New Place’ button. Get enough places approved and you can be a Kurator

To learn more about Kurator, ask @kurator

Tags: crowdsourcing, geo, kurator, places, woeid

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 11:11 and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.