Show HN: Island's First Open Data Project (open source)

2 points

15 years ago

I've just released the Open Elm Project which crowdsources information on Elm tree locations and their health to help monitor Dutch Elm Disease. Is the first Gov 2.0 / open data project for the Isle of Man, which is one of the few places which have remained relatively untouched by Dutch Elm Disease: 25 million tree have been lost in the UK vs 1% on the IoM.

However, last year the Government stopped funding professional tree surveys meaning the number of diseased trees is likely explode without any monitoring / reporting in place. So, not wanting to sit idly by, we built a site and a PhoneGap / jQuery Mobile app for Android and iOS to let the public do their own reporting.

The project is composed of:

A CouchDB backend hosted by couchone.com A Django-based site which uses makes use of Celery, S3 for photo storage and CouchDBKit for integration with CouchDB jQuery Mobile based apps wrapped with PhoneGap for iOS and Android which talk directly to CouchDB – photos are pushed to CouchDB from the phone, pulled down by Celery, resized and pushed to S3.

I'd love to hear what you think. And, if you can see other uses for this type of project, the source is there for the taking:

https://github.com/andrewgleave/OpenElm