RIDB Guest Book Check-In

[nicaford]

Many parks, large and small, provide physical guest books that visitors use to provide well wishes, observations, and humorous sentiments to other park visitors. We would like to create a virtual guest book system that allows visitors to parks to check-in and provide a short message to others. Multiple guest books would exist, each being mapped to an entity in RIDB. For instance, someone may check into the park’s guestbook and may also check into the specific campsite where they are staying. Once they have checked into a location, they are then able to browse the messages from others.

The service would be implemented as an API backed by a database keyed to the entities within the RIDB dataset. A reference mobile-first web application will be created during the summit to demonstrate the service. If time and resources are available, a reference native mobile client will also be created. The intent is that this service could be integrated into official government websites and applications as well as integrated into websites and applications created by third-parties.

As done with other check-in systems, there is an opportunity to gamify the system to incentivize use. The gamification could also be used as a promotional tool, such as increasing point values on underutilized recreation resources. Leaderboards could be provided and top scorers could be awarded small prizes like annual parks passes.

[danrademacher]

Would be great to build this on top of Foursquare / Swarm, since that's already so widely used.