My name is Robert and I am co-creator of TrashOut - worldwide project that is used to locate illegal dumps and helps to keep world clean. Word-of-mouth about EdgeRyders and Lote4 is amazing and so the message about amazing people gathering got to me of course through Natalia!
I would be glad if I can help you guys with any of your projects or ideas with my strong start-up-background experience from several projects. Just write me email, arrange a skype or meet me in Matera and we can talk about your business plans, concepts, social networks or pitching! I would be happy to be of help!
Was your app the one that Lets Do It uses to monitor trash dumps so that they know where to send the volunteers during the cleaning day? I think it was used also in Romania, where I’m from…
What usually happens after the app users upload info on illegal dumping? Where does the info go and how can those doing the work be confident that the problem spotted will be fixed?.. In an older discussion about a similar idea: spotting broken streets, the argument someone pointed out was that if there isn’t a commitment from authorities to solve it, what do people get out of being good citizens? in the end it comes down to who solves the problem I guess…
Yes TrashOut has a very good relations with amazing people from Let´s do it in many ways! They are using our reports, they are large contributors of reports and of course they are the ones who have hands on!
What happens after the report is made and submitted to our database?
It depends largely on locality, municipality and responsible organizations. In essence, everyone has the possibility to resend reports to reposible organizations and we, due to our system guarantee the trash site is really there. So you can “spam” your municipality for instance. In Slovakia recently, one great guy took few hundred reports and raised few hundred criminal complaints against an unknown perpetrator which of course ended up in media:) I could continue this way…
Hence after we found out that TrashOut is more a tool that people should use, not a social platform, we decided to move this direction nowadays while preparing TrashOut 2.0!
So whichever organisation downloads and uses the app in their community has an opportunity to leverage the use according to their own purposes or civic goals. Fair enough, and would welcome an example in your Lote4 session. It seems to me it’s a case where stewardship by communities is involved, but it is completed when their action triggers an active response. It ties nicely with this working definition peeps in London came up with:
"Stewardship manifests as the gardening of an ecology. In so much that it is not curation or archiving. Stewardship can only relate to that which is active - it acknowledges and works towards the preservation and growth of use value, exclusively. "
Well, I see you are already hard at work with your session in LOTE4, nice work! BTW, the city is highly sensitive on waste disposal, which seems not to work very well in the area. They have their local version of TrashOut, or FixMyStreet if you prefer… http://www.materapulita.it/
Perfect @Alberto! Don´t you please have contact for someone from this organization? Would like to contact them, I searched their webpage but was unable to find any contact.
Just playing the Georgia card here, but this idea would be very very useful for Georgia I think. And definitely something which Tbilisi Guerrilla Gardening could/would support, I’ll show Nika.
