TradeMapper HackDay - help fight illegal wildlife trade

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Illegal trade in wildlife threatens some of our planet’s most iconic species. Help TRAFFIC and WWF combat this threat: join us on November 8th in London for a HackDay to improve TradeMapper and help stop the illegal wildlife trade.

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What is TradeMapper?

The illegal trade in wildlife threatens some of our planet’s most iconic species such as rhinos, tigers and elephants, and evolves rapidly; taking advantage of new routes and other opportunities to avoid detection. To understand and manage the ever-changing trade effectively, scientists and conservationists need to work with large volumes of data that describe international movement of wildlife and wildlife products (like ivory and rhino horn). This helps them understand the spatial patterns of trade, and determine what factors are influencing it and how these can be addressed. These findings then need to be communicated clearly and effectively with decision-makers and the public. Only then can solutions be found, and wildlife protected.

To help, we built TradeMapper: an open source interactive browser-based tool that maps international wildlife trade flow data, allowing users to visualise the global trade in wildlife. TradeMapper offers a way to explore trends, both historical and geographical, in a way that is simply impossible when dealing with dry numerical data in a spreadsheet. http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/b/d/2/600_422028082.jpeg

Try it now
TradeMapper runs in the browser (no server-side components). Try it now with test data (http://trademapper.aptivate.org/?csvtype=cites&loadcsv=http://trademapper.aptivate.org/sample_data/cites/cites_unicorn.csv), or download real wildlife trade data from http://trade.cites.org/
The source code (https://github.com/trademapper/trademapper-js) is on GitHub, with a list of proposed enhancements to make it even more useful.

Who should come?
We are looking for enthusiastic Javascript developers, designers, data visualisers, conservationists, scientists, academics and anyone with an interest in using open-source technology to solve problems.

What is the Hackday for?
The Hackday is an opportunity to improve TradeMapper by thinking up creative solutions to problems, develop new functionality, fix bugs, and meet other people from technology and conservation communities. We hope that the Hackday will be a great way to kickstart an active community of coders interested in evolving TradeMapper in the future.

What is the latest news on TradeMapper?

Aptivate, TRAFFIC and WWF are all committed to working with a wide range of developers to pick up TradeMapper, improve it, put it to new uses, and really make it as good as we know it can be. Below are a few recent blogs and a video that might spark some ideas.

• TRAFFIC’s video tutorial and introduction to TradeMapper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP3_tT496ts&list=UU59RrLwkHEzAXDDINMpBdPw)

• What is TradeMapper? (http://www.aptivate.org/en/blog/2014/09/22/this-is-trademapper)

• Reflections by Aptivate on building TradeMapper (http://www.aptivate.org/en/blog/2014/10/23/building-trademapper/)

• Why WWF have gone open-source – become a TradeMapperHacker (http://blogs.wwf.org.uk/blog/wildlife/illegal-wildlife-trade-wildlife/the-good-kind-of-hacking-becoming-a-trademapperhacker/)

• How Aptivate are already using open-source TradeMapper to map other types of data (Open Contracting) (http://aptivate.org/en/blog/2014/10/30/mapping-open-contracting-data-with-trademapper/)

What skills do I need to help out?
TradeMapper is written in Javascript using d3.js (http://d3js.org/); if you’re good with JS and/or HTML/CSS then you’re perfect.

If you’re not a Javascript/HTML developer, but are interested in helping us design improvements to the system or linking it to other projects, feel free to come along too!

Will there be prizes?
The day is really about donating your time and skill to a fantastic cause, but offering prizes is a fun way of creating a bit of competition, and perhaps gives you a little something in return for your involvement. In this spirit, WWF has kindly offered three adoption packs (a tiger (https://support.wwf.org.uk/adopt-a-tiger), an elephant (https://support.wwf.org.uk/adopt-an-elephant) and a rhino (https://support.wwf.org.uk/adopt-a-rhino)) for the most useful or innovative results of the day, and all attendees will get something to say thank-you for taking part.

Who else will be there?
We are expecting around 20 developers and users on the day, and will work hard to help this community stay in touch and carry on their work after the day ends.

Supporting the day will be a team including Willow Outhwaite from TRAFFIC and Paul Roberts from WWF, whose enthusiasm and passion have driven TradeMapper from day one, Neil Gunn from WWF who coordinates plans for the future of the tool and Hamish Downer from Aptivate who led the technical development of the product.

We hope to see you there, please RSVP now!

When and where is the Hackday? 10am-5pm on Saturday 8th November at a Central London location (TBA). We will provide food and drink, and an opportunity to network over a few drinks at the end of the day., timetable is:

9.45 - 10.00 Arrive and welcome

10.00 - 10.45 Coffee, fruit, introductions, What is Trademapper, getting to know each other

10.45 - 11.15 Ideas generation

11.15 - 4.30 HACKING (Lunch is provided around 1pm)

4.30 - 5.00 Demos and prizes!

5.00 Onwards - decamp to The Goldsmiths pub nearby

TradeMapper and the Hackday are organised by a collaboration between WWF-UK (http://www.wwf.org.uk/), TRAFFIC (http://www.traffic.org/) and Aptivate (http://www.aptivate.org/).