We are looking for help with design and software development, but there are many other ways to contribute (translate, wrangle data, recruit others, write newsletter content). Ideas to get started:
- Open an issue, weigh in on issues, or contribute a pull request in one of our GitHub repositories or projects
- Join our Slack workspace and maybe even one of our ~monthly community calls
- Share your thoughts in the GitHub Discussions
- Email info@fallingfruit.org
- Tell all your friends about Falling Fruit
- Help translate our interfaces or species common names into your language (
#translation
on Slack) - Help resolve user-submitted problem reports or curate user-submitted location types
- Help us draft a new forager's code of ethics (see https://github.com/orgs/falling-fruit/discussions/100)
- Run ad campaigns for us using Google Ad(Word)s (they support us with a large monthly budget)
- Produce content for Falling Fruit's social media channels
- Produce content for our upcoming newsletter (
#newsletter
on Slack)
- Design a template for our upcoming newsletter (
#newsletter
on Slack) - Design a yard sign (with our new logo) that tree owners could use to mark their tree as open or closed for harvesting
- Design a new sticker (see our old ones)
- Ask your city or university whether they have a tree inventory that can be added to the map (
#datasets
on Slack) - Assemble data for a first-draft spatial database of protected lands (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ah6jKO9uizBqeBtTVoIXi51gpYEQEyYzzastcMKOp5Y/edit#heading=h.ubvuwkfv2v84)
- Submit a harvesting calendar for your region explicitly tied to Falling Fruit types
- Link Falling Fruit types to the Plants for a Future (https://pfaf.org) database in order to link to PFAF plant profile pages
We use a PostgreSQL database on a self-managed Amazon EC2 Ubuntu server, which also serves all our APIs and web interfaces. Our widely-used website and mobile app are built on aging frameworks and are now inactively maintained:
-
falling-fruit – Our website (fallingfruit.org), built as a Rails 3 (Ruby 2.3.4) web application, admin dashboard, and database migrations.
-
falling-fruit-mobile – Our mobile app (Google Play · App Store), built with Cordova, Angular v1, and the Rails API.
Instead, a new API and mobile-friendly website are being developed as eventual replacements:
-
falling-fruit-api – Public REST API (https://fallingfruit.org/api/0.3 · documentation) built with NodeJS and Express.
-
falling-fruit-web – Web app (beta.fallingfruit.org) built with ReactJS and the new API. It introduces long-awaited features (multiple photos per review, multi-type location filtering, link from list to map in mobile view) but still lacks some existing features.
There are several major features that we've wanted to develop for a long time but have not found the time to finish.
- Seasonality filter (described here). A Develop for Good team made progress on this goal in summer 2023. They built predictive fruit ripeness models from historic climate data and phenology observations: dfg-seasons.
- Tree inventories. We have identified almost one thousand tree inventories to add to our map! If only we had the time to deal with all that data. See opentrees-harvester.
- Interactive location types (described here)
- Protected lands / foraging regulations map layer (described here) – This is a frequent request from land agencies and a political must in the long term.