An extra special aspect of both apps is that they were co-designed with our teams of citizen scientists.
That means that from the very start, we had a team that helped us to design the entire app and project.
COVID hit in the midst of our starting up period, and since then we've been having meetings with the co-design team roughly every two weeks (94 in total).
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The #Nachtlichter app was designed to assist participants in counting and classifying light sources. We pre-defined street segments (usually from one street corner to the next), and participants went there at night and reported all the different lights they could see.
One question that we had to deal with early on was "how do we categorize all the different light sources that are out there?" In the end, we came up with 18 categories (including "other" as the final category for uncommon things like flagpole lights, glowing park benches, illuminated water fountains, etc.).
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