Banana Pup

A web app which facilitates the propagation of banana trees.

This was produced as a free-choice assignment for OSSU CS.

The app makes the participant attend an online "Banana University" where they are taught and tested on the principles of growing bananas. If successful, phone numbers are exchanged with someone who has offered a banana tree. In a years time the app will send out a text reminding the participant of their karmic obligations.

The idea came from working simultaneously as a permaculture gardener and in our local food coop. In the garden, I would often plant banana trees and be amazed at how easy they were to grow. In the co-op, we would stress about where to get bananas from and how hard they were to find locally.

It seemed ridiculous that there were so many people with the means to grow bananas not growing and sharing them. As a permaculturalist I'm inclined to think this way about all food, but bananas in particular seemed like particularly easy win. Also, I was studying in a house in Darwin, in the shadow of many banana trees (and willing to do their bidding).

So this project is a return to that co-op problem, whilst ticking a few other requirements:

• Something that would encourage people to plant trees and spend time outside.
• Testing the idea that you can use the concept of a "walled garden" to make sure that everyone on the inside has been educated on a particular topic. Like a site induction for a virtual space.
• Testing the idea that making something meaningful (therefore harder) could be more attractive than making something simple.
• Experimenting with what might make something have viral uptake.
• I wanted practice implementing the haversine formula for determining if 2 points on the earth are within a certain distance.

Reflecting on these, I think it goes some way to satisfying all of these points, though it doesn't flatten the curve of wealth distribution in it's function...

However, a huge cause for modern wealth disparity comes from the way that software projects are funded: employees do the work once and then shareholders get paid infinity times infinity, in the form of global reach and subscription based pricing. So it is very important to me to experiment with ways of getting paid for development work successfully- just by the hour and for costs incurred- in the hope that the amplification effects of software flow into the world rather than someone's pocket.

In this case I have invested the time into making the software myself it is available for free to anyone in Newcastle, NSW. If you would like to activate it in another city, please make a donation.