Year in review
Photo by Jay Toor
2018 is finishing, and I would like to reflect on the numbers that we have achieved this year working hard. Hey, after all, we want to prove to Santa that we were good kids over the year so we can enjoy this Christmas with wonderful toys (and the family, of course!).
Projects
This year we have launched several projects, but two of them are Solar maps, La memoria del Circo and a European Space Agency project.
Solar maps
We worked with Greenpeace Spain to launch a crowdsourcing project where we ask people to measure the area of the Spanish public buildings. The goal? Put solar panels on those roofs and learn how much energy and CO2 we can save.
The project was launched in May, and as of today, more than 900 buildings have been completed, resulting in more than 820 thousand square meters to install solar panels. This measured area means that the Spanish government can save more than 230 million, yes MILLION, of Euros in 25 years, and 36 thousand tons of CO2. Not bad, right? Moreover, if we install these panels, it is like if we remove from the roads more than 284 thousand cars!!! Amazing.
La memoria del Circo
This project is so beautiful that we can only love it. PYBOSSA has been quite popular lately within the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector and this project is one of those that get your childhood back. Because who has not gone to a Circus? Older or younger, with the changes in it, we always have been in this magical place.
For these reasons, Factoría Cultural wanted to launch a crowdsourcing project where we could recover the history of the circus. Because the past is missing in private collections and almost no one can access it.
The project has started with a tiny and unique collection: the last performance in the mythical Spanish Circus PRICE.
Detecting buried archaeological sites
When we were contacted by ESA (European Space Agency) about using our PYBOSSA powered platform to detect buried archaeological sites we were amazed.
The project is cool. ESA is using aerial images to find archaeological structures beneath the ground in areas surrounding the city of Rome, Italy. And right now you should be asking yourself: how do they do it? Well, it turns out that crop marks in this area are usually of ancient Roman origin. They tend to have clear geometric patterns, revealing the foundations of buildings. Roman roads can be distinguished as very straight lines of parched vegetation (overlying ancient paving stones), with strips of greener vegetation on either side, where ditches used to be.
How cool is that?!
PYBOSSA
We have worked hard in improving PYBOSSA, and we launched what we think it’s the most prominent feature of the year: you can now capture data directly within PYBOSSA. Yes, you don’t need EpiCollect+ or any other tool to capture videos, images, audio and geolocalize them.
PYBOSSA now allows you to build surveys and spice them with some videos of the area. You can ask users to read aloud some text on the street and save it, or well, use your imagination :-) This feature is fantastic because you can even get your Internet of Things (IoT) recording data that can be automatically sent to a PYBOSSA server so the crowd can analyze/validate it.
Numbers
Regarding numbers this year, all our “known” PYBOSSA servers have saved more than 730 thousand classifications, analysis, transcriptions, geolocalization, validation of tasks. Not bad, as this is only from 12 servers, just from our clients. We know that there are many more PYBOSSA servers out there, so PYBOSSA is helping tons of people all over the world. For example, LibCrowds from the British Library has more than 127 thousand contributions (since its creation), and Burntheregister has around 9 thousand contributions.
We have written more than 218 thousand lines of frontend code. We use Vuejs, Nuxtjs to build Progressive Web Applications for our clients.
For PYBOSSA code we have added 4438 lines of code, removed 1246 and modified 142 files this year. Not bad at all.
Summary
Two thousand eighteen has been an excellent year, and we hope that 2019 will be even better! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!