Ability to create a Crew which provides several layers/types of interactions automatically - work together to finish cities, compete inside the Crew to have the most completed streets, and compete against other Crews in cities.
I think the Crew vs Crew competition can be on City, Region, Country, and global scale. Some of it can be automatic (very similar to the User lists throughout the site), and some of it can be more “event” based (like the monthly AMSAP Challenges, but on a Crew level).
In gaming, they tend to use “clan” (which I hate). This doesn’t line up with anything in the running world, but “club” does. The super-generic “group” doesn’t do much to invoke feelings of fun and exploration. Then “team” feels a bit too competitive. I recently learned about Running Crews, and the differences between crews and clubs sparked my interest. They seem to be a bit more community-focused, might have a “start together finish together” approach to their outings, and can focus a bit more on the adventure of running. Those aspects all feel like they overlap with CityStrides quite a bit.
I think I’m leaning towards Crew, with the risk of it being a bit lesser-known.
While creating the Crew, you should be able to choose between different types
open: Anyone can join
request: People can request to join, and requests must be approved
invite: People cannot request to join, they must be invited by someone already in the Crew
Crew Members should have a set of role and status values
Roles: member, captain, owner … where captains can manage members & owners can manage members, captains, and the crew itself
Status: accepted, invited, requested, banned
Don’t limit a Crew to one City
On the Crew ‘dashboard’ page, a list of Cities should be displayed where any Crew Member has completed at least one Street (in other words, combine the City list of each Crew Member into one list)
Simplest version is a setting on the Crew which notes the day(s) and time(s) of their scheduled runs e.g. every Tuesday at 7pm
Another version is one member proposing a date/time and letting others join/accept
A more involved approach might incorporate recent average pace to help team people up
Some form of messaging/chat
This could be used to organize group runs, make “divide and conquer” plans, etc
Ability to create Routes for the entire Crew to use
Could be useful for group runs
Routes page may need two tabs: Mine and Crew(s), where the Crew lists Routes for any Crew you’re a member of
Crew-based Challenges to allow individual Crews to set up time-based efforts for themselves
Ability to collaboratively complete cities
Similar to how there are User-scoped City pages (the city links from your profile), there should be Crew-scoped City pages
Show the overall progress in that city based on the combined effort of all Crew Members
Show everyone’s LifeMap displayed on the page at once (potentially in different colors)
This has serious ramifications around non-Supporters, given the limitations of their LifeMap data especially on certain devices that cannot handle displaying too much data
List of Crew members, sorted by their street count in this specific city
List of other Crews making progress in the city
List of incomplete streets (combined effort from all Crew Members)
List of complete streets (combined effort from all Crew Members & potentially highlighting the Users that helped complete it)
Internal Competition
We already have the Crew Member list on each City noted above
The page for the Crew can include a list of its members, including street counts
This list would be total, not City-specific
Competition between Crews
Display Crews in a new tab on Country/Region/City pages, with their combined progress
Automatic entry into AMSAP Challenges (as a Crew, not individual members)?
Ability to create Challenges on the Crew level (so it’s the Crew that joins and everyone in the Crew contributes progress)?
Questions
Should there be an upper limit of members, to keep Crews on an even playing field?
Should people be able to join multiple Crews?
Should owners be able to set minimum requirements to join a Crew?
I like all the ideas here ! It looks very promising ! Can’t wait to see this taking place !
A lot of my friends don’t see my challenge of doing all the streets of our city like something they can do on their part since they walk/run less. Adding crews would motive a whole new kind of “smaller” walker to record their map and participate in City Strides together.
Should there be an upper limit of members, to keep Crews on an even playing field?
I would suggest no. There could be small crew, like me and my close friend, but also big crew like all the runner of a city / a state / a country. Those are maybe to big computationally nonetheless
Should people be able to join multiple Crews?
Yes. In exemple for myself I would like a crew with my close friend, but also one with every Citystrider of Québec City that would like to team up. There’s quite “big runner” here that have already finish the city. It would be cool to have a crew with them, but if I can only choose one, it would be with my friend.
It could be an advantage for supporter to be in more than one crew.
Should owners be able to set minimum requirements to join a Crew?
Why not ! For public crew it’s a very cool idea. You can automatically join the 100,500,1000, etc streets crew. you can only join a city crew if you did x% of the city.
Idea :
It could be cool to the combined map to have a “heatmap” color for the place where more running have taken place ? Very useful if crew can be very large.
Coworker mentioned to me that the killer feature here would be a “grove street minigame” where crews compete to “own” streets in their neighborhood and battle (by running) to take nodes from other crews.
I’ve had this “king of the hill” style game per street in the back of my mind for like three years now.
The biggest decision is around how the underlying game should operate - how it’s decided that a crew owns the street.
Which of these is how you would expect the game to mark a street as owned by a crew?
The crew that has most recently completed the street
The crew that has completed the street the most number of times
Other (please comment)
0voters
The first option would have way more turnover, because a crew could watch for ‘lost’ streets and go re-run them the next day (or as soon as they see they’re gone). This might be ok, because if a crew focuses entirely on maintaining ownership, they will have a much harder time expanding.
The second option might favor larger crews. They can organize a e.g. weekly crew run where they all complete a street at the same time - if there are 100s in the crew then another crew with e.g. a dozen members would have to put in much more effort to steal the street.
“The crew that has most recently completed the street” creates lots of fun interactions. Imagine a group gets large enough that it needs governance: the running president picks who runs what and when. A large group needs running elections. Or a running civil war if the running bylaws cannot be agreed to.
Small groups have fun interactions too. I already know my friend and I would hood up at midnight for twenty-miler “running raids” to steal back neighborhoods while the large groups are asleep.
After a while and with historic data/crews, this would make it near impossible for new crews to claim anything.
If you aren’t a fan of the super fast turnover, then the middle ground is leagues/seasons, where it resets after a period of time to maintain freshness, reward loyalty but also give newbies the ability to take part.
Most important feature for me is messaging / support / sledging It’s nice to be able to talk to other people ‘competing’ for the same city. In Brisbane, Australia, the top 10 people have found each other mostly via social media. We’ve had xmas social runs and meetups and we chat every few days as we find weird things and incorrect roads. I guess this is an extreme case, where the ‘crew battle’ is actually individual competition. It woudl be cool if we coudl work together to complete our massive city though!
DEFINITELY want the abiltiy to show all of our life maps in the city in different colours - mostly because when we organise a social catchup, it’s becoming harder and harder to find streets where none of us have run!
The fact that people are searching out others in various social media sites across the internet, instead of choosing “Forum” in the top left menu & posting here There’s still so much educational work for me to do (because, to be clear, it’s my fault that there isn’t a clear and obvious connection between the core site and this community site)
I’ve had requests in the other direction as well - mostly around privacy & larger city-wide run clubs, where people want to join a Crew but maintain their privacy.
Though the more accurate request is probably “allow public people to be identified in the Crew LifeMap (via unique color & mouse hovering) and private people to not be identified in the Crew LifeMap (base color, no hovering)”. This still has caveats e.g. a Crew with one private member effectively removes that privacy.
There’s also the fact that in-group privacy might be different than how privacy is handled for non-members viewing a Crew’s LifeMap.
Just thinking out loud: You could compare crews on how many members have completed a street. The default would be one, which I think is the idea that is talked about the most. This means that a street has to be completed by any member to count. That would fit with a strategy to divide a city: you run this area, and I’ll run that.
But you could also require each street to be run 2, 3, … X times. This would fit better with a “Let’s all run together” strategy. If the rankings for all types are available, than a crew could choose on which one they want to focus.
The fact that people are searching out others in various social media sites across the internet, instead of choosing “Forum” in the top left menu & posting here There’s still so much educational work for me to do (because, to be clear, it’s my fault that there isn’t a clear and obvious connection between the core site and this community site)
Not your fault. Happens everywhere. The fact that you ahve to go to a different URL and setup a separate login loses everyone. If you pre-emptively created a forum topic for each “city” and provided a link FROM each city top user list (or even better a “water cooler” chat???) then I think you’d get much better participation. Could you also include the most recent 1 - 2 ‘chat’ lines. I really think casual ‘water cooler’ chat is more appropraite than a forum entry.
I’ve had this “king of the hill” style game per street in the back of my mind for like three years now. 
It’s nice to be able to talk to other people ‘competing’ for the same city. In Brisbane, Australia, the top 10 people have found each other mostly via social media. We’ve had xmas social runs and meetups and we chat every few days as we find weird things and incorrect roads. I guess this is an extreme case, where the ‘crew battle’ is actually individual competition. It woudl be cool if we coudl work together to complete our massive city though!