Canvis.app

Digital crowdmapping campaigns, citizen science projects, and mapathons have been deployed for countless cities and communities around the world. They have been used to track infrastructure issues, spot invasive species, gather feedback on proposals, organize trash cleanup, and even map sexual harassment reports!

These are proven methods for planners, researchers, and community organizers who wish to tap into the 'wisdom of the crowd' and who value of engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, deploying campaigns like these is still expensive, time-consuming, and challenging. Software developers are not cheap, thus many worthwhile projects are failing to get off the ground.

Canvis.app is a web platform that makes it easy and affordable to create, share, and contribute to crowd-sourced mapping projects like these. We hope that soon, municipalities, students, and engaged citizens everywhere will be using Canvis to map the ideas and issues that matter to them!

Canvis.app was created to tackle a problem we faced ourselves: it's too difficult and expensive to launch a digital crowdmapping project. However, people can use our platform to solve all kinds of problems in their communities!

Ultimately it is up to the people who launch campaigns on our platform what issues they tackle. We are focused on a few key use-cases:

1. Mapping social issues, especially sexual harassment reports. Canvis.app was inspired by the many successful harassment mapping projects in Melborne, Cairo, and elsewhere. These maps are extremely powerful-- they provide a valuable outlet for women, and are eye-opening for men and for the community at large.
2. Mapping urban planning issues, especially gathering feedback, ideas, opinions and complaints from citizens. We are currently working with researchers to study use of parks and greenspace. We hope to support local cleanup movements like the viral #trashtag.
3. Mapping natural resources. Tracking invasive species, counting birds or sensitive species, reporting violations or perhaps collaboratively managing trails and open space areas.

If we provide the right set of tools, we believe canvis.app can be used to launch high-quality, successful campaigns like these, for the benefit of communities everywhere.

Since there are so many use-cases for our digital crowdmapping and engagement tools, we are currently focused on with researchers, urban planners, and activists who are themselves focused on worthwhile problems.

During one pilot project we have completed in partnership with a German research organization (the project that inspired us to launch canvis.app), we asked the citizens of Karlsruhe to mark several things on a collaborative digital map: 1. where they would like bike lane improvements, 2. where they would like high-speed bike lanes, 3. where they would like bike sharing stations. We distributed the URL openly, but found the most high-quality feedback and the most contributions came through local bike advocacy networks and bike sport clubs. They understood the cycle networks best, and found the most value in engaging with out project.

Similarly, we advise each project launched with the canvis.app platform to have the following:
1. A well defined geographic area (city, district, neighborhood)
2. A well defined target audience
3. A well defined problem space

We are NOT a 'once size fits all' platform or app (e.g. 'global trash map', or 'German cycle safety map'). Based on our experiences, these approaches often fail to draw significant buy-in and solve real, local problems.

Canvis.app is a custom built web-app that runs on any modern web browser, supporting both mobile and desktop.

We serve two distinct user groups.
1. Planners, researchers, activists who wish to create and disseminate a digital crowdmapping, engagement or data collection project.

2. Citizens, locals, laypersons who have been invited to contribute to a project hosted on our platform.

Group 1 creates a project on our platform, and disseminates it to Group 2 using a distinct URL (canvis.app/my-project-name).

Visitors to this URL are presented with a very simple, user-friendly set of step-by-step instructions. These are configured and customized by the project creator using our simple web-editor. Most will involve a few steps: An introduction page, an interactive mapping page, some survey form questions, and a conclusion page.

We find that this template works well for dozens of thematic areas. We are working hard to add features and functionality to support even more use-cases!

The data collected on our platform is fully portable, so you can import and do your analysis in GIS software, Excel, or wherever. We are also working on features that make canvis not just a great crowdsourcing and data collection tool, but a great standalone resource and data portal as well.

We, the canvis.app team, serve primarily as tech enablers, but we love to share our expertise and see projects succeed.

Current solutions are Enterprise focused, or follow a very standard Software as a Service business model. Most often, municipalities or ambitious project leaders are choosing to build their own ad-hoc solutions from scratch.

This approach is not making the most of a wonderful set of methodologies, thus communities are failing to reap the rewards. Only those with the biggest budgets get seen.

Our first innovation is to dramatically reducing the costs and work involved in launching a crowdmapping or citizen science project for your community. We have built the platform on a modern web stack that allows us to keep our maintenance and labor costs extremely low, and our team very small. This eliminates the biggest cost for most projects, and we pass these savings to project creators. We also save *project creators* time and energy with our DIY web-editor.

We are also the first solution to offer an all-in-one platform where visitors can find projects happening near them, in their communities. If something is missing, we offer a generous free tier so they can launch one themselves!

Lastly, we try to provide the right set of tools for many types of projects. In the future, we would love to integrate projects hosted on third party software, too! That way citizens, researchers, and officials alike know exactly where to go to find and launch projects.

Our platform could not exist without very recent developments in open source software and cloud infrastructure, not to mention research in crowd-sourcing and digital participation.

On the backend:
We've built the first version using a Serverless Architecture. Serverless is a new paradigm in web development that allows us, as developers and social entrepreneurs, to reduce the time and labor spent on managing hosting infrastructure, databases, and computers. We can instead focus on the experience of our users, and on consulting our customers. Not to mention the serious cost savings by not having to hire more developers!

On the frontend:

Canvis.app is a Progressive Web App, blurring the lines between mobile app and webpage. Using new open-source JavaScript libraries, we can more easily provide a smooth and user-friendly experience for contributors, and for project creators who use our fancy web-editor. This technology also speeds up the development time so we can keep adding features and improving, with minimal time and labor invested.

For the mapping portions, we utilize MapBox GL JS, a new map rendering library that supports beautiful, fast, interactive maps, with data sourced from OpenStreetMaps.

Combined, we can support interactive maps with thousands of contributions, comments, and more-- putting "big data" in the hands of planners and researchers.

During my Master's Thesis, when we set out to ask the citizens of Karlsruhe how we might improve their city's bike infrastructure, we looked at a variety of software solutions. We wanted to deploy something fast, cheap, easy, so we could focus on finding contributors and analyzing data. This proved to be difficult.

In the end, when we interviewed planners and mobility experts about the results, they were pleased, and found the data insightful and interesting. But were they willing to pay $1200 monthly enterprise subscription fees, and invest the time and energy again to launch similar campaigns? Unfortunately not. This is what inspired us to look deeper into the problem.

We found hundreds of examples of crowdmapping, citizen science and digital civic engagement campaigns. We thought, what if anyone could launch these sorts of projects, quick and easy? What if we brought all these powerful projects and use-cases together under one platform?

The result is canvis.app-- and as we continue to learn more about our study areas and customers, we are continuing to tweak our approach and focus

We are in the very early stages, running ongoing test campaigns with alumni networks of a few hundred people.

We have been selected as a tech provider for a major research proposal (pending acceptance and approval). This project would reach several thousand citizens in lower-income communities around Central Europe.

When we have released the next major software update in a few months, we will dramatically increase our advertising and partner-seeking efforts to launch more projects on our platform.

With these experiences, in 5 years we will have fine-tuned a set of tools and methodologies that will be of interest to any forward-thinking municipality in North America or Western Europe. The result will be several hundred projects receiving several millions of contributions per year combined-- our platform is already being built to support this volume.

We hope to have launched 15 paid projects by the middle of 2020, and many more pilot projects. Each project should reach between 200 and 3000 citizens, depending on scope, geography, and use-case. This is a modest goal given our current lack of funding and bootstrapped approach.

By this time, we hope to be working with major non-profit and advocacy organizations to serve as champions for these projects, and from whom we can receive feedback and fine tune our product. This is extremely important to us, and a major focus at the moment.

If we are successful with this goal, we will seek funding to scale our product around the world. We believe that every city on Earth can benefit from the types of projects our platform can enable, and we know first hand that municipalities are looking for better civic engagement tools to build out their visions of a "smart participatory city".

1.) Growing data privacy concerns and legislation might deter citizens from contributing, and might make organizations hesitant to launch engagement campaigns. This includes the risk of litigation for both us and our customers, should someone abuse or misuse our platform. Balancing openness, the usefulness of data, the flexibility of our platform, and data privacy together will be a challenge.

2.) Positioning ourselves next to enterprise solutions from giants like ESRI, SeeClickFix. Our lower costs and a more hands-off and DIY approach, is going to be a conceptual challenge-- we have to invest time and research into getting our B2G approach and offerings right.

3.) The risk of trying offer too much, for too many, instead of focusing on a single niche offering.

1.) We have decided not to employ any sort of user-tracking or analytics, aside from cookies which are used to manage user log-ins and assign anonymous user IDs. We are looking into more non-intrusive analytics solutions for both ourselves and our customers. We are investing time and thought into our Privacy Policy and offerings: ensuring data portability (export and deletion), and establishing a model that provides our customers AND our contributors full ownership of the data hosted on our platform.

2.) The biggest customer base, the low-hanging fruit, is naturally the most competitive space: for crowd-mapping, this is the topic of urban issue reporting (SeeClickFix, Nextdoor). For mapping in general, it's geospatial analysis (ESRI). While both have a lot of potential for us, we choose to focused now on other use-cases. That means seeking initial customers in the NGO, academic, and non-profit world rather than local governments. We will tackle these spaces when we have more experience and a stronger network.

3.) Crowdmapping is a truly flexible methodology with so many potential use-cases. It's fun to be creative and think of all the great things you could do with interactive web maps. The question we are focused on answering: What cases for collaborative mapping are not better solved by another method (plain old surveys or workshops), are interesting to citizens and communities everywhere, and are worth paying at least a few bucks to launch?

3 part time employees.
One (Founder) doing code/engineering/design, the others doing sales and project management.

Our founder wrote his Master's thesis on the topic of "Public Participation in the Smart City", and previously studied Environmental Governance as well as Environmental Studies and Urban Planning. He is from California, but now works as a career software developer building software for urban mobility in Germany, in addition to building Canvis. Building software that solves environmental and urban problems is his passion and profession.

Our part time sales and development support team previously worked on one the first, and most well-publicized and successful sexual harassment mapping projects in the world. This real-world experience is immensely important for us.

Each of us has been involved in startups, business or entrepreneurship programs and endeavors at various points in our careers. We look forward to growing our team and dedicating more time to this wonderful project.

We unfortunately can't publish our partnerships until pending research proposals have been approved, hopefully in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Our beneficiaries and customers:

1. Researchers who wish to deploy digital citizen-science projects to gather data about the physical or natural world.

2. Researchers who wish to study a population, especially to understand their ideas, feelings, opinions, about their surroundings.

3. Urban planners who wish to improve public acceptance of proposed projects, identify and solve urban issues, and improve civic engagement and discourse.

4. Activist, community organizers and NGOs who wish to raise awareness on a topic, especially through engaging large numbers of participants.

Our value proposition:
With minimal time and cash investment, you can achieve the above by logging into our platform, generating and configuring a project, then sending the URL to your study group or participants.

We host the webpage on our servers, manage the data, handle security and authentication, and ensure a fast and user-friendly experience that works on any mobile or desktop web browser.

Up until now, the platform is entirely bootstrapped and self-built. The technology we have chosen allows us to run our initial campaigns entirely free-of-cost.

Without any seed or pre-seed funding, we are focused on joining large funded research projects, together with several organizations we have already submitted proposals. Projects like these will give us the initial stability we need to dedicate more time on development and sales.

For advanced functionality, and to cover the hosting costs for large volumes of traffic or large numbers of contributions to a campaign, we charge a monthly fee. These features are targeted towards funded organizations, and include advanced access controls, data export, and data analysis tools. We estimate a fee of around $350 per month should cover projects of all sizes, but currently only have limited data from which to base these numbers.

Thus we have one potential path to financial stability without taking on any debt or giving out any equity whatsoever.

Aside from receiving enough funding to focus on this project full time and hire a second developer, the most valuable things Solve can provide us are partnerships, guidance, publicity and legitimacy.

Currently, all our free time is dedicated to writing code for canvis. Networking, self-study, feedback, partnerships... these important things have unfortunately been put on the backburner until now. So the ability to meet with other Solver teams, get introductions and feedback will be immensely appreciated!

We need help on a lot of things. Deciding how to narrow our focus. Deciding which organizations to target first. Testing our user experiences, improving our branding and marketing language, doing long term financial planning. It sounds like the Solve network would be a fantastic leap forward for us!

We are especially interested in organizations working on urban issues, social issues, or sustainability issues. We want to partner up and launch campaigns on our platform!

• Women's rights organizations, so we can help them launch urban harassment mapping campaigns.
• Municipalities and local governments looking to gather public feedback, ideas, opinions or reports.
• Organizations and universities interested in leveraging citizen science and crowd-sourcing methodologies.

We know that Greenpeace, World Resources Institute, and World Bank share a lot of overlapping interests. As do development cooperation agencies like USAID, Peace Corps, GIZ, IDRC.

We would be extremely thankful to receive this prize as it would allow us to transition our developer and founder (me) to full-time, and free up significant time and resources for improving the relevance and reach of the canvis.app platform.

The platform is already making great progress and I am excited to think about what could be accomplished-- with out a doubt, this funding would allow us to sooner launch fun and inspiring citizen engagement projects around the world.

My perspective as a male was completely and utterly transformed after I spent just a few minutes browsing the Melbourne and Cairo sexual harassment maps. The concept is hardly groundbreaking, but the results are impactful. To see how frequent and widespread such incidents are is alarming, especially in areas of the city you might know and love. However, to actually explore and read each individual story... this is how such maps can change peoples opinions, actions and understanding of the world. Harassment is horrific and happening everywhere.

If I am successful in growing and establishing the canvis.app platform, similar campaigns to the Cairo or Melbourne harassment maps will be launched on my platform, in cities around the world. More important than your funding would be your support, partnership, and introductions to other interested women's organizations.

We would be extremely thankful to receive this prize as it would allow us to transition our developer and founder (me) to full-time, and free up significant time and resources for improving the relevance and reach of the canvis.app platform.

The platform is already making great progress and I am excited to think about what could be accomplished-- with out a doubt, this funding would allow us to sooner launch fun and inspiring citizen engagement projects around the world.