The aim of the project is to fill the digital map of the city of Debrecen with the location data of various shops, organisations and tourist destinations (point of interest - POI). To achieve this goal, EDC Debrecen involved high school students, who were able to complete their mandatory community service hours through this project. The students, in groups of 2x6, accompanied by supervisors, spent 3 weeks travelling around the Great Boulevard (Nagykörút) of Debrecen, taking photos of each POI and uploading them and the necessary information to a database. This is effectively the historic city, a 4 km² area with nearly 2,000 POIs. The database contains, among other things, the address of the POI with GPS coordinates, opening hours and other contact details.
POIs that were not yet on Google Maps were uploaded by the students, and existing POIs were updated if they were found to be incomplete or out of date.
At the end of the project, which lasted 28 working days and 755 working hours in total, the database was the result of the joint work of 39 people:
- 1,810 POIs visited and recorded;
- 2,578 photographs;
- 1,176 POIs with information uploaded to Google Maps.
This has allowed some POIs to reach over 1,000 visits in just a few weeks.
The project was awarded the Diamond Awards 2020 of the Hungarian Marketing Association in the Content Marketing category. The aim of the Marketing Diamond Awards is to contribute to the spread of sophisticated, professional practice by recognising and widely promoting successful, effective marketing solutions and to help marketing professionals to carry out marketing activities to the highest possible standards.
The success of the project is shown by the fact that it was repeated in 2021, when the aim was to check and update the previously mapped POIs and map other busy areas of the city. The choice was made to focus on the Tócóskert and Széchényi kert, one of the most populated residential areas in the city, and the area within the Nagyerdei boulevard, the most developed leisure area with many newly established restaurants and shops.
In 2021 the project involved 20 students from 4 schools.
At the end of the project, which took 32 working days and a total of 535 working hours, the database contained:
- more than 1,000 POIs visited and recorded;
- approximately 3,000 photographs;
- nearly 200 POIs newly uploaded to Google Maps.
