Ruby on Rails

On Sat, 15 Feb 2020 at 06:30, David Hughes <davidpeterhughes@gmail.com> wrote:

I am a scientist at Penn State and the United Nations. We have a Platform called PlantVillage that is a public good with a backend built on RoR with various apps farmers use around the world to get help. The reason these farmers (e.g. in Kenya) would use the tool is that they dont have access to human experts who can help them know the problems in their field (pests/climate change stress). You can read our blogs here https://plantvillage.psu.edu/blogposts

I wrote back in 2018 to this group to ask about getting your help. Many of you were very keen on helping. THANKS!! 

I didnt follow up as I am not a coder. I pay a team in India to do this.  So, it was just easier to keep with them. I didnt even know where to start in sharing the code on GitHub. 

Now in recent weeks Ruby experts at Penn State (who built ScholarSphere https://github.com/psu-stewardship/scholarsphere) have looked at our code and it is very bad! Rubocop showing errors off the charts and no tests/commit. 

It needs your help and we are actively trying to make sure we dont have any privacy issues so we can open source it. 

I am reaching out now as we have an extremely urgent situation though. You may have seen the news about Locust swarms in East Africa? They are the worse in 75 years

According to the UN, 19 million people are in immediate danger. They are at Level 3 (crisis). Since we can expect hotter, drier weather in some affected regions in the coming months (low crop outcome) the addition of locusts in potentially a famine. 

Here is an article today https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51501832 The video is informative 

They are mostly in Kenya where control is possible. But we need lots of people out there with phone use our app and reporting sitings. Currently, they use WhatsApp but since that is private we cannot get the GPS coordinates of the locations. 

The Indian team I employ built an app. But I am sure it has problems and if we have thousands of users it could fail. 

Here is the apk file of the app https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nAvTolDEz48mPLtIPO6abumW6KQAM-00/view?usp=sharing

It is super simple: It must do two things 

1) Allow users to upload images/videos from which United Nations Staff can determine the location and stage of locust swarms

2) Enable app users to have a free-ranging chat function. There should be two chat channels: general (any users of apps) and admin (just select). 

One of the problems we have is the code base for the locust app is tied to the rest of out platform and apps. So, there are security issues if user names and passwords etc. 

Your coding skills could save lives here: that is not an exaggeration! If you can help that would be wonderful. I am very new at this so dont know your culture but am willing to learn. We have thousands of agriculture experts and farmers working with us. We could have thousands of coders like you. So, if you can be patient and help me build this we can create a community using the skills you all have helping the poorest people on our planet cope with stresses like locusts and climate change. 

Fair warning! If you jump in the code won't be pretty and documented. I can incentivize you with some swag :) 

I am trying to hire Ruby people at Penn State so will have an advert soon.