Allow Projects to be 'Featured' - for easy access on 'Explore Projects' page

[SColchester]

Problems

• The first page of the Explore Projects page of the Tasking Manager is dominated by old irrelevant projects. This is not true of 'Urgent' projects (because there are so few), but there are hundreds of 'High' priority projects and they are sorted by default from oldest first. This means that all the 'High' priority projects on the first page of the Explore Projects page are at least a year old at the moment and they are the most likely projects in this priority level to have data needs which have since moved on (i.e. contributing to these projects is likely to have relatively low impact).
• Over time, as OSM has become more complete it has become harder and harder for beginner level users of Tasking Manager to find projects which are appropriate for them to contribute to (simple buildings only projects are much rarer). In the past, the first page of Explore Projects had several projects appropriate for beginners, nowadays this is rarely the case and likely makes a difficult/unattractive onboarding process for new mappers and may lead to new mappers making bad contributions to projects that are too complex for them.

Solution

Enable projects with any priority level to be manually marked by a Tasking Manager admin (via API) as a 'Featured project'. Any featured project would then appear directly after the 'Urgent' priority projects on the first page of the Explore Projects page in the default view. This would be used to highlight very relevant (impactful) non-disaster (disaster projects are set to 'Urgent') related projects that are well designed with good instructions and descriptions. This could also be used ensure there is at least one appropriate and impactful beginner level project on the first page of Explore Projects for easy access. Several projects could be featured at the same time, see mock-up below:

Candidates for featured projects would be decided on by members of the Activation Working Group (which includes staff and volunteers), to ensure fairness, for wider perspectives and to avoid HOT/Hub projects being consistently featured by HOT staff.

By featuring high quality, impactful projects this would incentivise the organizations and communities on Tasking Manager to ensure that the projects they are creating are well designed --> If they create a high quality project they have a higher chance the project being featured and given extra prominence for faster completion.

To summarize, the default ordering of projects on the Explore Projects page would then be:

Urgent > Featured > High > Medium > Low

Alternatives

• Change project sorting to sort by most recently created projects first in each priority category
  • This has been discussed already and has its own disadvantages, including encouraging project creators to publish too many similar projects at the same time and reduce project completion levels. It also does not solve the lack of beginner friendly projects problem mentioned above.
• Change project sorting to sort by projects with soonest 'Due date' in each priority category
  • This has also been discussed, however very few project creators add a due date to their project and this would not solve the lack of beginner friendly projects problem mentioned above
• Set up a recommendation bot to show a custom sorting of projects on the Explore Projects page to each logged in user that sorts projects to maximise the likelihood of the user selecting a project
  • @SColchester discussed this with @omranlm on 20 Jan 2025 and we agreed that this would be outside of the capacities of HOT/our community to set this up

Additional context

This issue stemmed from an Activation Working Group discussion on 17 January 2025 (see thread for context).

[RAytoun]

Another option could be to recognise the mapper status beginner and set the first page to easy projects only as default for beginners.

If they reach Intermediate status then the default first page can shift to easy and moderate.

[SColchester]

@RAytoun yes, and that option is more related to this existing issue I think. I'd argue that both these enhancements could run simultaneously to improve Tasking Manager - (1) Enabling featured projects (2) Default filtering easy projects for beginner mappers. Thereby tackling both the problems listed above (1) Too many old irrelevant projects on the Explore Projects page (2) Often no beginner friendly projects on the Explore Projects page.

[Adrian-Shobrooke]

Can one of the project displayed be one randomly selected from all mappable projects based on filtered options? This would change every page refresh for each mapper and thus bring every project to the first page over time. Something that might never happen otherwise for many projects.