cleancity

This project seeks to resolve the prevalent problem in cities which is haphazard garbage disposal. Clean city is a reporting platform that relies on crowd sourcing to collect data and effectively display it on the web. Users use their android devices to report garbage data and image. The reports collected are graded on the map according to the volume of reports in the proximity. We aim to make our city cleaner by alerting both common citizens and officials about garbage in their surrounding.

Description

CleanCity

Problem Statement

On the streets of Kathmandu, there are lots of places where wastes are gathered in one spot and left there. You may think these are just dumping sites but in reality these spots are just roadsides or unused plot of land. These locations are always frowned upon by people and everyone wants to do something about it. However most people have not been able to do anything about it except for hoping that somebody would do something about it. On the other hand, its not like the government is voluntarily choosing not to do anything about it. Instead, there are so many such garbage spots and many in random unreported areas that they don't know where such spots are. There needed a way to let them know where such garbage are deposited and where most of the people are bothered and which spot requires immediate attention.

Our Solution - CleanCity

When we ask ourselves what we could do to show responsible people that a spot had accumulated garbage and that it needed to be cleaned up, the answer was quite simple 'Crowd Sourcing'. It was obvious that one single person would not be able to report all those spots and when one submitted reports it would not be apparent whether people were bothered more by one spot or other. Then we had to figure out how to collect all the data. Since most people these days are using phones with android devices we decided to use that platform. Also almost every phone comes equipped with a GPS chip so we can get pretty accurate location from those cell phones.

How CleanCity works

Cleancity works on two ends, Phone user that reports garbage data and Web user/official that views data. So, we can break down CleanCity in two components:

Android Application

The android application is the medium to report data. The application is designed in such a way that it is very easy to use for every person and that it wont cost people, who are busy, a lot of time. It has only three screens. The first screen just greets you and pressing the report button takes you to the next screen. No log-in or sign-up is required. In the select screen you can select what type of garbage is there and also add your own personalized comments. You can take picture of garbage by pressing camera icon. If your GPS is on, pressing the button above Latitude gets your location. When all data is added, you can press submit to send data to server which is uploaded to the database (and server folder in case of images). If the top left button on second screen is pressed, it takes you to a setting screen where you can set ip address and port number of the server. This was added because the ip-address would change on different networks and as development was done creating a local server and not actual server, we needed to be able to change ip addresses without compiling the whole code again. The role of android user/reporter ends here.

Web Map

The reported data was stored in the database. The web map extracts the data from the database and displays them accordingly. The web map uses base data of OpenStreetMaps which is also a crowd sourced data. With this we intend to promote the use and implementation of crowd sourcing. Then a layer of points from database are added to the map. The points are styled according to the type of garbage it is associated with i.e. green for spots with bio-degradable waste, red for spots with non bio-degradable waste and blue for spots with mixed waste. If there are multiple reports in close proximity it shows by the number in the symbol in the map. Viewing this the responsible officials can easily see which location contains garbage and that which location requires more