start, iterate…

Here’s a video by the EcoMo09 organisers on free.near.me. As you can see the presenting/AV setup was a bit flakey!

Also, the project has been written up on the Betavine site.

free.near.me wins EcoMo09

Last month, Alex, Nick, Jase and I had our first unconference experience. We entered EcoMo09, and would you believe it? We went ahead and won the thing! Here’s the story.

EcoMo is a green 24-hour dev camp run by Vodafone and Betavine. Overnight, teams/individuals produce original prototype software, to be judged on technical and environmental merit. Our hastily-concieved team name was ‘Wizards of the Digital Frontier’ and our entry was free.near.me.

Whaa?

Freecycling is the act of giving unwanted items to others instead of throwing them away. People offer TVs, sofas, prams; almost anything to those able to take them. No money changes hands.

Why?

The web allows this kind of activity to really accelerate. The largest online community in the field is The FreeCycle Network (TFN). Technically and logistically, it’s not great. It’s an inherently closed system based on Yahoo! Groups. Earlier this year, OpenFreecycle attempted to address some of these shortcomings.

There are wider issues with TFN. Controversies have long dogged the site and more recently outright mutinies have been reported. It’s an old story of what happens to closed, centralised communities.

But on the Internet, when people get frustrated or dissatisfied, alternatives appear and transitions occur. This is what’s happening in freecycling right now. Many new freecycling sites are popping up. Great ones, like REYOOZ, Freebootr and Good News For Polar Bears. A new and better marketplace is emerging.

What does it do?

So, now we have the options, how can we best make use of them? The marketplace is fragmented but it would be nice to search it from one place. Better yet, it’d be sweet if something told you when an item you’re looking for becomes available! From these ideas came free.near.me, a freecycling aggregator (with mobile client). Here’s the feature list:

• Ability to search across sites and aggregate results.
• Saved searches with notifications (push to mobile client, SMS, Twitter, etc.).
• Local area searches (from location-aware mobile device).

How?

Here’s our presentation from the event (presenter notes at the bottom of slides):

I think there’s a video coming soon from the event organisers.

free.near.me’s middleware service is a Sinatra application, hosted on Heroku. It provides a RESTful API with responses in JSON. In the 24-hrs we concentrated on implementing an adaptor for the REYOOZ API, but we’re hoping interested parties will contribute additional ones.

You should be able to log in and have a play with free.near.me. The GitHub page for the project is found here.

We also produced a mobile client for Windows Mobile. It was written in C# using the .NET Compact Framework and Nick’s own kinetics UI framework. Here’s some screenshots:

W00t!

So, yeah, we won! Both the Judge’s Best and the People’s Choice awards. And with it, lots of nice goodies. I couldn’t have imagined at the start. Details of all the winners here.

Tired but happy. (Left to right: me, Alex, Jase, Nick. Photo by td-london)

Thanks to Vodafone, Betavine, BASH staff and our fellow competitors for making it a great event.