Curation & Voting

This is the heart of what makes the Cycling Commons different: curation over completeness. The Commons doesn't try to list every climb that exists — it surfaces the ones worth your weekend, as judged by the riders who know the area. For things that are a matter of taste, the best-of is the point; an exhaustive dump helps no one plan a ride.

Two kinds of data, two strategies

The single organising principle of the Commons:

	Subjective / experiential	Objective / utility
Examples	best climbs, bike-friendly stays, finest views, history & culture, top quality rides	road surface, water points, toilets, repair stations, hazards, bike shops
Goal	curated — the best, ranked	complete — as exhaustive as possible
How	riders vote; refreshed in rounds	one-tap reports; confirm & decay
The value is	the ranking	the coverage

Voting makes no sense for a water tap — it's either there or it isn't, and you want them all. Ranking is the whole point for a climb — you want the best ten, not all two hundred.

Regions

Curation happens per region. A region is standard public geography — a country, province, or municipality — not a game shape from any app built on top. Keeping the Commons' regions neutral and independent is deliberate: an app's game layer may map onto Commons regions, never the reverse. That keeps the Commons usable by anyone, decoupled from any one product.

For each region the Commons surfaces a curated best-of:

• the best climbs
• the best bike-friendly stays
• the most scenic views
• the best history & culture to ride past
• the best quality rides / routes
• (extensible: best café stops, best gravel, etc.)

So when you arrive somewhere new, you get a clear, opinionated picture of the best there is — instead of drowning in data.

The voting rounds

• Riders vote on the candidates in each region.
• A fresh round opens each season. Four rounds a year give the Commons a rhythm that follows the riding — a reason to come back as the season turns, and room for new entries to rise.
• Rounds re-rank, they don't reset. The standing list carries forward and votes shift it. A legendary climb is never wiped out by one low-turnout season; it just has to keep earning its place.

Solving the cold start: seed from popularity, refine by vote

Empty lists before a voting culture exists would kill the feature. So the Commons seeds the initial ranking from aggregate popularity — which roads see the most use, derived anonymously from aggregate signals. Votes then layer loved on top of used-a-lot. Two complementary signals, and the list is never blank on day one.

The backlog: nothing is thrown away

The curated best-of is the lede, not the whole library. Every climb, view, and route beyond the top list still lives in the Commons as a backlog — fully queryable for completists who want it all. The Commons ranks data; it never discards it.

Integrity

• One rider, one vote per candidate per round; guards against stacking.
• X adapts to the region. A flat province may have three climbs worth listing; the Alps have hundreds. The curated target scales with the density of genuinely good options.
• Provenance without identity (Manifesto §VIII): the Commons stores that a vote was cast and when, never a public record of who voted for what.