I blogged this over here: “Tool needed: simple solar spotter”
If anyone has suggestions, or would like to get stuck in and prototype something - please do!
By the way, let’s not launch things on the unsuspecting public without discussing it first. We can get the most momentum out of this if we time it right, and we’ve some ideas about how to do that, so I’d be grateful if you could keep us in the loop.
Hi @danstowell
I’m new to this forum and was scrolling through when I found this post. Apologies if I misunderstood the problem statement.
I honestly agree with you of the tool should be as minimalist as possible. Instead of leveraging OSM tool or webscraping using twitter, I thought of something like a simple website, which contains a form which also takes in the user location whenever they spot a solar panel. This can be cleaned and published to OSM for whatever purpose.
The benefits would be:
Hi @rahulmr96. That’s a good suggestion. Basically yes, I like it. There’s one complication which is that maybe the solar panel isn’t exactly where the user is, maybe it’s “over the road” or “I can see it over there” and they probably wouldn’t be able to describe it precisely e.g. “150 metres south-west of here”… Do you think the approach would work OK? Would people be able to give a bit more information in a text box and that might suffice?
Yes.I think that maybe a feasible option. Think of a survey monkey form (or any other form) which will mention both the coordinates and also the user input. If let’s say there are multiple users reporting with a single radius. We could either cluster them and obtain a single point. I’d love to collaborate with you and work on this!