Enactus "Take HACKation" Hackathon Project Description
The motivating problem: how to get people more engaged in outdoor activities.
Information to work with: People like to post pictures from nature and share it on social media. These photos may contain more than just the scenery. What if, they have invasive plants in there that is unidentifiable by the common bypasser?
The attempted solution: We establish an app platform such that people can hunt for these "info containing" photos on the internet (ie. instagram, facebook) and from the photos the person can report on the presence of the invasive spieces in this app. These reports from different users will be sent to a database where they can be displayed in a list. From here, each user of the app can also take on these reports and go to the indicated location to clear out the invasive spieces.
The app will feature social features in that each user will have their own profile to show off achievements and scores based on filing reports and taking action.
Additionally, the app will have a tutorial section to teach the user how to identify these spieces and how to eliminate them. This way, the user can get started even when the user does not know how to do these tasks.
From here, the database of reported data can be given to the park board to let them have a better insight towards the ecological wellbeing of their parks and take intervention early.
By its baselines, the app is heavily focused on the environmental aspect as it is what it was made for. The means that the app accomplishes this is through the social aspect, by making this process a social enterprise. People generate new values in the form of posting needs to fix the surroundings, and see them get fulfilled by watching their requests fulfilled and taking action to fix other's requests. These actions will lead to a sense of identity to the environment. As the primary benefactors of this app would be the park board and related environmental groups, it should be easy to obtain funding from these groups as it is only needed to cover for serverside maintainance, and running ads can cover a lot of its upkeep as well.
General topic: Environmental Sustainability
We found that no matter how fond we are with the ideas that we come up with, it may not ring with the general audience, therefore we will try to foster the passion rather than just letting it burn in our hearts.
Fostering passion -> engagement, sense of belonging, connection, the risk of losing things.
The issue of environmental sustainability.
we aim to take some action on invasive plants in our area(talk a bit about the plants)
We have created an app and here's how it basically works:
-user learns about these plants and how to identify and remove them -user uploads reports of invasive plant sightings(where, when, what) via 2 ways: -*hunting for them on social media where unknowing people post them -seeing them in real life but is not sure -the online algorithm will analyze picture (insert CV algorithm here) and see if it is legit. -if legit, it is posted -if not legit, it is rejected -user will see that there are many posted reports of these sightings. -the user can choose if he/she wants to take care of these reports and go to the tagged place to clean up. -the user reports that it is cleaned up through the app
From here, here are features that we are considering in adding: -incentive system -social media integration -google maps api implementation for better locational tagging -insight generation from growth models on the map.
Potential implications: database can be access by park admininstratives to more easily monitor ecological wellbeing of their premises.
but what about the whole fostering value?
it creates a social enterprise as it helps the users gain an appreciation of what we have and what we need to do to protect it. All the while the users are doing their parts by taking action to collectively protect the environment.
The only foreseeable upkeep costs belong to the serverside, as there will be some amount of data and processing that is required. This can be easily be fixed with potential funding from parks administrative since they are benefitting from this.