Happy Earth Day, one and all 🌍
Each year on Earth Day (April 22), our team takes a moment to pause and think about our individual and collective impact on the planet we all share with one another — and the flora and fauna that call Earth home.
Today, we also celebrate Sloan the Three-Toed Sloth: our beloved mascot, part-time community moderator, and publisher of anonymous posts here on DEV. If you ever want to post something but don't necessarily want your name attached, Sloan is your gal. That's a lot of responsibility for a mammal that moves at 0.24 km/h (0.15 mph)!
Sloths like Sloan typically live in the lowland, tropical jungles of Central and South America — so we're pretty grateful that she spends so much time hanging out with us on DEV.
This year, we asked Sloan how she wanted to celebrate Earth Day. She's still recovering from the exertion of our 2020 celebration (featuring an interview with Dr. Rebecca Cliffe, one of the world’s leading experts on sloths!) So today, she asked us to pass the microphone to our community...
Sloan's request: Share your favorite open source projects that benefit the environment in the comments below
Sloan knows that software developers can have a meaningful impact on the world we live in. Nothing demonstrates that more strongly than the commitment of the open source community to share knowledge freely and improve codebases with wide technical input. There are so many open source projects that exist to serve the environment, and many of them are actively seeking contributors like you!
A few of our favorite environmental open source projects include...
- Rainforest Connection (RFCx) — A non-profit tech startup building scalable, open source solutions to illegal logging, poaching, and environmental threats.
- Trends.earth — a QGIS plugin that supports monitoring of land change, including changes in productivity, land cover, and soil organic carbon.
- Awesome Earth - A bank of resources, services, products, and ideas that help fight the negative impact of climate change.
Plus, the winners of our Hack the Planet contest with New Relic built some pretty incredible tools including...
What about you? What are your favorite sustainability/climate change-focused open source projects? How can the DEV Community contribute?
💚 With Earth Day love from Sloan and the DEV team
Top comments (11)
Happy Earth Day, everyone! Thanks for all you do, @sloan !
I have to add the Open Sustainable Technology Project, which lists worldwide open technology projects preserving a stable climate, energy supply, and important natural resources.
Listing of worldwide open technology projects preserving a stable climate, energy supply and vital natural resources. https://opensustain.tech/
Open Sustainable Technology
"True sustainability is open." - protontypes
Our ambition is to list all sustainable, open and actively maintained technology projects worldwide. Your contribution is necessary to keep this list alive, increase the quality and to expand it. Read more about its origin and how you can participate in the contribution guide, community chat, presentation slides and related blog post. Please contact us to give feedback, hints and ideas for OpenSustain.tech or create an issue.
Contents
The Website Carbon Calculator is well worth looking at if you are interested in your website's environmental impact. The web uses a huge amount of resources, and if we all optimised our sites a little to reduce carbon emissions it would make a big impact.
Websites like this one should have a greater future and more detailed charts to encourage web designers for new sustainable approach and design trends.
Ooh this is awesome. Thank you for sharing!
deep and dope!
Happy Earth Day 🌏💚
Hey Sloan,
How do you stay updated on the climate change news? Go to different sources to read some articles?
Don't worry, I got your back. 🤘
Recently, I made this small web app that can get you all the news for climate change from all the sources. 👌 Oh! if you're too busy with work at DEV, you can save those articles too. 😉
Link: polrr.news
GitHub: github.com/thesanjeevsharma/polrr
How can DEV Community contribute?
Well, I am looking for a new job 😁 Maybe, you can refer me lol 😂
Me getting a good job = more time for OSS projects
This isn't an open source project (though they do discuss how it's built with OSS software), but I've always found this solar powered website to be a pretty cool proof-of-concept:
solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/...
Some of the techniques are a little over the top in my opinion (like dithered images), but I appreciate the mindset and for this particular site they suit its aesthetic.
I just joined this awesome project called CASSIE.
It's an open-source web tool for automatic shoreline mapping and analysis using satellite imagery.
An open-source web tool for automatic shoreline mapping and analysis using satellite imagery.
CASSIE – Coastal Analysis via Satellite Imagery Engine
Satellite image collections
Usage
First navigate to cassiengine.com/ then click on
Access the toolbutton.Cassie uses Google authentication to identify their user and allow the use of the Earth Engine. Before starting make sure that your account is registered on the GEE platform. If you are not registered on Earth Engine, Sign Up
…
You can learn more at
cassie-git-develop-lia-univali.ver...
as search engine I use Ecosia, which uses the ad to plant trees.
ecosia.org/
Bloom was a great effort for more transparent carbon footprint calculation. Unfortunately, I just discovered that the repository was archived.
I build a transparency-first carbon-footprint calculator
github.com/JarnoRFB/planted-co2-ca... on top of it. For now some values apply only to Germany, but I want to include data for other countries in the future. Let's continue to make carbon footprint estimation for transparent together in the open source community.