Hello everyone,
We have a double blog post this week as we missed last weeks update. There is a lot going on!
Both weeks we had very productive community zoom calls where we got to hear lots of new ideas and suggestions from our growing global community. Every week our users get to share their feedback which always helps make our app easier and better to use.
I submitted a 12-page reporting about my near 15 years doing citizen science research to the Irish government Oireachtas committee on education, research, science and innovation. Unfortunately they were “too busy” to discuss the positive implications that citizen science has for society and the environment but I did get some positive replies independent of the committee. You can read the report here. I have since sent the report to the next committee on “environment and climate action”. Currently waiting for a reply.
Last week, we released a new mobile app update (v3.1.3) which greatly improved the tagging of our app including:
- removed whitespace container to show more of the image
- added a new button to move the image up and down to see behind the buttons
- hold the new button to make everything disappear
- show metadata when you close the tagging
- move selected tag to the most recent suggested tag
- hide blue action button while tagging
- make too many tags scrollable on metadata page
- design improvements on smaller screens
We also translated our website into Portuguese which has made OpenLitterMap available to millions of people across Portugal and Brazil!
This week, we added some new features to the platform.
- We clustered our data by year, and all time. You can now view data for any year on the map again. The clusters update every night at midnight Irish time (GMT).
- We prevented the same photos from being uploaded more than once via the mobile app
And we have some new features that are being worked on.
- Admin verification is finally improving. Admins will be able to filter new photos by user and country. The interface has also improved considerably.
- We gave admins the ability to skip images they don’t want to verify.
- We decided to give Admins XP and Littercoin for helping to verify images.
- The next major release of the mobile app will add Teams functionality. Users will be able to see the Teams leaderboard, create a team, and join any team they have an ID for.
- Finally, we are going to give users the ability to add any text tag, meaning you will be able to apply any tag you want, and not be limited by our pre-defined list of tags.
We are also more than halfway through our funding from Project Catalyst on Cardano. We have received $30,000 from the $50,000 we were awarded. Last week, I joined Plutus Pioneers to learn the Plutus programming language to write smart contacts. The funds we received have significantly improved our app and will result in the launch of the Littercoin token. We have 2 more proposals for Fund 7, which started voting yesterday. More than $8 million will be distributed in Fund 7. Hopefully the Cardano community appreciates the work that we are doing and recognises the value in the community we are building.
If you would like to see or vote for our Fund 7 proposals, you must create an account on Ideascale but you can see them here
Gamifying Littercoin — This will add gamification to our app and make earning Littercoin fun!
The Littercoin Stake Pool — This will give each Littercoin value by accumulating staking rewards in smart contract.
We have a lot more work to do. Hope you will join us in our next community call and help shape the future direction of our open source data collection and environmental monitoring platform.
Cheers,
Seán
