From St. Louis Hackerspace Wiki

Open House Projects

These are projects that will be worked on at the Arch Reactor open house on August 19 2009 at 4049 Shenadoah Ave.

waste.archreactor.org - Nathan

I'll be working on a web application will provide St. Louis with an easy way to log the locations of repositories (dumpsters, etc.) of unwanted goodies/necessities, and the use value of items recovered from these locations.

The cool side-effect (and the most interesting part of this project) is figuring out what mechanical and electronic resources are most available in St. Louis. As hackers, we pride ourselves in being able to make Cool and Useful Stuff out of Junk. And the best junk to focus our noggins on is the junk that's really easy to find.

I would also like to create a heat map that makes it easy to associate data collected (types of items, number of items, use value of items) with regions throughout St. Louis City and County. Who knows what sort of interesting paradoxes are hiding in receptacles of refuse.

I will be writing the alpha version in Perl using the Google Maps and Google Visualization APIs.

The project will more or less begin during the Open House. I will create a very basic skeleton to work with, and an outline of modules that will need to be created. Anyone who wants to help develop, design the user interface, or talk about the project should find me.

I am also hoping to have a demo/mock-up/vertical slice ready to show off. The goal is to have a working site ready to record data on by the end of the open house.

All the details will be released at the beginning of the open house at http://waste.archreactor.org.