CrowdDoing has found small groups of trained professionals who know about specific nature benefits. There are people who have been trained in “Attention Restoration Theory”, “forest bathing”, “eco-therapy”, “nature deficit disorder reduction”, and other related terms. This has not be turned into a universal type of knowledge for any society to adopt in a modern context of majorities of the population living in cities and suburbs. CrowdDoing’s goal with Nature Counter is to create universal usable knowledge about what the benefits of nature dose are, how to access the benefits of nature dose and how to validate nature dose benefits for yourself.

CrowdDoing.world, https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/74278432/

Our nature counter application gets people an expectation of benefit proportionately. We have a partially finished android and iphone app in gitab aiming at an MVP, and plans for a V2 partially developed. The app is not on the market yet.

Project Challenges

Our nature counter team has been built up through virtual volunteers who have been arriving from 25 countries. The challenges of being cumulative, documenting our initiative well, and being collaborative are real.

Constraints & Assumptions

We are working under an agile/scrum methodology. We have also locked in features for MVP but are iterating 1.0 features.

Sponsor-Provided Hardware and Software

Gitlab, Slack, Google Groups, Microsoft Planner. We’re using React Native for app development, mongoDB for the backend database, and firebase for user login credentials.

Project Approach

Our approach is multi-pronged, inclusive, and collaborative. It ensures that all those involved are engaged in a democratized, federated, and localized manner. We have already developed a framework for a Nature Counter mobile app, to be completed by citizen scientists, which can be tailored to local circumstances. The framework will synthesize and simplify existing literature on specific health and commerce benefits of specific “doses” of nature. The gap between the research and its applications will be filled in by the “citizen scientists.”

After an extensive design review, we are continuing the process of building out app features for the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version of Nature Counter. By the time the student team(s) is/are ready to start work in Winter Semester 2023, we expect to be roughly 50 percent finished with MVP feature development.