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Hey look I found State College on Google Maps
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Huh, there seems to be something on Penn State
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Is that....?
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ARRTTTT??!?!?!?!
Inspiration
GeoGraffiti was inspired by a social experiment that took place on Reddit.com called "Place". The experiment involved a 1000 x 1000 pixel canvas that was able to be modified by any user of the site. However, each user could only modify a single pixel every 5 minutes. The result was many communities on the site coming together to create, protect and manage their art. link
What it does
GeoGraffiti takes Reddit's social experiment to a new level. Instead of a 1000 x 1000 pixel canvas, the canvas in GeoGraffiti spans the entire world map. Also, instead of being able to modify any pixel on the canvas, users are restricted to modifying pixels in a certain range of their location.
How we built it
The GeoGraffiti webapp is written entirely in javascript using Node.js, Express, and Socket.io. It also has a database to save the canvas during webapp downtimes which is written in Python using flask. Both the webapp and database are hosted using the Elastic Beanstalk Amazon Web Service.
Challenges we ran into
None of us knew Javascript that well, but we decided it was the best tool for what we wanted to make. The result was a lot of stack overflow.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We finished most of the major features we wanted and were able to get the webapp deployed on AWS.
What we learned
We learned Javascript along with the respective technologies required. One of our teammates was exposed to GIT version control for the first time.
What's next for GeoGraffiti
There are still a lot of optimization issues like how we are handling the storage of each pixel. There are also various user interface bugs to be fixed. We also originally wanted a user system for GeoGraffiti, but that was a bit too ambitious for our skills and limited time.
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