Crowdsource App for Climbing Area Stewardship

Greetings:

I'm trying to find/make a streamlined method for Eldo climbers and hikers to report trail conditions and perhaps noxious weeds. I'm envisioning an app that would record GPS, trail name, a few simple categories (tree across trail, loose steps, fully-laden poo bag, myrtle spurge, ...), a photo or two, and a description field. On my end, I'd like to aggregate that data, fix the condition(s), and notify the reporter where things ended up.

I can sorta-kinda cobble something together in Filemaker Go, but it will be clunky, hard to distribute, and might not be very portable in case some other trail/invasives/forestry land employee wants to try it. I simply do not have the intellectual horsepower to write a slick iPhone/android app from scratch.

Any help appreciated. If you can point me to a development kit for extreme dummies, even better.

If somebody for some weird reason would like to take on a pro bono project, I can remunerate you with volunteer hours, will ply you with fine coffee and/or beer, and will do the legwork to try and get grant $ if you/we can get a beta version working. Which is a fancy, slimy way of saying there's no money in this.

PM me if you'd like.

Mike McHugh
Park Maintenance Guru/app-writin' n00b
Eldorado Canyon State Park

Miike wrote:http://seeclickfix.com/ people use it on occasion to report urban trail conditions

Mike McHugh wrote: Looks very cool - but I can't find any pricing on their website (which might be saying something insidious). Long story short, I can't spend any state money on this project. It's gonna have to be homegrown.

I started a sample issue you can see- seeclickfix.com/issues/1571651

Consider a mobile-friendly website instead of an "app".

Apps have their advantages, but for a quick-start cross-platform tool, I think a website would give you more bang for your buck.

I'm a web developer and not an app developer, so run this statement by app developers to confirm: If you build the website correctly with forward-thinking, you can build in an expansion plan that will let apps integrate with it down the road (such as by planning in an API).

Kent:

A web page has pros (no writing/distributing an app) and cons (I'd bet a lot of users will give up quickly when they don't have bars).

There is a fantastic weed mapping app. It does everything right - including caching field data until it can upload.
whatsinvasive.org/

A trails version of that would be the ticket.

If anybody is interested, there's now a facebook page for Eldo trails:

facebook.com/eldoTrails

If you post a trail problem and location (bonus points for pictures, GPS, or nearby climbs/landmarks), I'll get after it.

I'll also post volunteer opportunities, status updates on trail projects (Rincon!), and stuff.