In an earlier blog, we talked about The Green Intelligence's idea for an app to keep records of planted trees for CO2 compensation in Nepal. In this blog, we'll tell you how we made that idea a reality in a week. With a team of 3 consultants, we set aside 3 days to build the Green Intelligence app. And the result is certainly impressive.
Create the design
The first morning, we start with an online mini-design sprint with Matthijs van Rijn from The Green Intelligence participating online as product owner. In a Miro board, we go through a selection of the topics that we always cover during a design sprint. Find out the most important problem we want to solve, clarify the process of planting trees and explore technical conditions.
Of course, creating an app for users of rural Nepal is somewhat different from the applications we often make for our customers. For example, the app must be able to work completely offline. Even though there is sometimes a connection to a farmer's plot, the farmer often has no call/internet credit and will use the WiFi point in a nearby village to upload information about his planted trees to the server. Creating synchronization mechanisms for offline applications always takes some thought, but luckily OutSystems offers standard functionalities for that.
(Nepali) challenges
Another condition that you might just forget is that the front end of the app must be readable in Nepali script. This can be achieved with OutSystems' multilingual component.
An additional wish is to geo-plot the farmers' plot so that location-specific plant advice can be given using height, location and orientation. A farmer can walk around the edges of his land to mark it online and thus provide GPS coordinates of his area.
The end result
After 3 days (4 if you add some final tweaks), we finished the app. The great thing about such a mini project is that the app is used immediately. After a few days, the first explanation sessions in Nepali villages are already a reality and after a few weeks, the first trees planted have already been registered. Bizarre to see that people on the other side of the world are getting along with an app that we built in our “work free time”.
The planting season in Nepal is now coming to an end and we will then see how we can further help The Green Intelligence get this new digital way of improving the viability of newly planted trees fully operational. In any case, it was a valuable experience and an educational process for us.
For more info, check The Green Intelligence whether invest directly in trees.
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