Yonder Swift
Help pastoralist communities around the world preserve their livelihood, by providing them access to information and resources (e.g grass land, water, safe routes) to prepare and support their migration journey.
The objective of the project is to design a working prototype for a mobile application which provides pastoralists community with information on land monitoring: water availability, grassland, and assist communities in networking.
We decided to tackle one of the NASA challenges that has to do with planet Earth, specifically pastoral communities. If you're not familiar with pastoralism, think migratory farmers. These are people who move from place to place, sometimes with a herd of animals, searching for their next source of water or grasslands. These people thrive on mobility. When lands become infertile, they need to move on, literally "in search of greener pastures."
We wanted to build something that utilizes big data to help this often neglected part of our population. Smart phone usage in developing countries is on the rise, growing 16% from 2013-2015. However, even if these farmers have smart phones, they may not be in an area that's serving up great data service. We wanted to come up with a few different solutions to reach potential users with different amounts of access.
We ended up coming up with 3 possible mediums to access the data we aggregated: A web app, a mobile app, and a text-based service. Our solutions were deliberately lo-fi because of the likelihood of slow internet connections or none at all.
Twilio number - 678-841-8305
- Waterpoint Data Exchange is how we got our water data. It uses Socrata which was really easy to work with.
