Footnotes: Crowdsourcing Hikers to Preserve Trails

Produced by Dong Jin Ahn, Ben Fields and Kevin Merritt (Bachelor of Science in Informatics '09).

Over the last two years over 40 million young adults went on hikes all over the United States, while volunteer organizations contributed 80,000 hours maintaining these trails annually. Despite these numbers, trail maintenance still lags behind trail use. To design a more flexible trail reporting process, this project investigates the use of crowd-sourcing, a technique through which the public helps capture and systematize large amounts of data. Footnotes, consisting of a mobile application running on GPS-enabled iPhones, allows hikers to tag "notes" with geographic location data. Different trail problems and issues are categorized, so users can easily report these when they encounter trail issues. With the ability to aggregate trail information for land managers, Footnotes is intended to expedite trail maintenance. By harnessing the hiking community through mobile reporting, a more accurate log of trail conditions can be established.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• udub
• information school
• washington
• uw
• informatics
• bachelor of science
• ischool
• technolgoy
• capstone