Name
Grinfrastructure... Hopefully you'll smile while learning about infrastructure for natural resources.
Inspiration
- Arnold Tompkins - The Philosophy of Teaching This book asserts that a teacher must invoke a "spiritual movement" in the learner. That is, interesting or valuable information is merely a baseline -- the teacher must be compelling enough to change your perspective, etc.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass Robin introduces the world to the "words which are said before all else" also known as the "Thanksgiving Address". This is a lengthy ceremony expressing gratitude to all that is before us. She admits that it's [paraphrasing] "hard to express gratitude for industrial concepts" -- thus, this project.
- In general, sentiment around climate change and sustainability is often negative (for various reasons). This tool doesn't attempt to fight that, but offers an alternative perspective which aims to encourage small actions, or even more ambitiously: inspire a career in natural resources & infrastructure or nudge someone down the path of becoming a relentless warrior for the Earth.
What it does
Brings two people together in a low friction way (make 1 choice, enter 1 word) to discover the local public infrastructure which delivers a natural resource to them enabling something they enjoy. In addition, the tool encourages speaking out loud (through karaoke style narration & shared audio visualizations) and ends with a set of suggested actions to take.
How we built it
- Built on a JS real-time backend that let's you basically write front-end code and some functions in one place (Convex)
Challenges we ran into
- Dealing with syncing users
- Workflow & timing related to combining statements
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Coming up with something that feels relatively concrete in a short timeline
What we learned
- Dealing with LLMs as a function
- First time messing with Convex
- Tried a variety of software engineering practices (no planning, planning, spec-driven)
What's next for Grinfrastructure
- Add electricity as an option
- More advanced data structures: polygons of coverage (currently I only hard-coded a minimal representation of Portland's water infrastructure as a graph)
- Community vetted data about infrastructure
- Add a statement at the end about the maintenance that must occur
- Additional suggested actions
- Write out a full statement instead of only submitting a single word
- Pick from other people's statements that you resonate with
- More than 2 users at once
Built With
- convex
- gemini-flash
- react
- vite
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