Oceanic Impact

Project Description:

“Let’s Talk Butts”, led by Lisa Chen, initially started off as a community project which was restricted to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. The project is designed to educate the community about environmental pollution resulting from cigarette butt litter, which is the number one litter item in the world. The second major function of the project was organizing community cleanup events and engaging the community towards solving this global issue. The organization is currently planning to install cigarette butt collection canisters and ashtrays in public places in the community, enabling people to dispose of the butts via these canisters instead of littering the ground. These butts can then be collected and sent off for recycling.

The organization is currently using traditional methods to educate people by using printed material. In addition, they have a social media page on Facebook with can be located at https://www.facebook.com/letstalkbutts. These methods have been a hinderance and inconvenience to the growth of the organization which resulted in the creation of this project.

To facilitate the growth of the organization Team 11, which is composed of a team of developers from Algonquin College developed a dynamic website for the Let’s Talk Butts Organization.

This provided Lisa with a more effective online platform in which she can engage her stakeholders. It is also manageable and scalable for future initiatives. The website enables users to access information in the two official languages, English, and French. It also includes two maps; one that highlights the location of the cannisters and the other that identifies current and past clean up locations. Furthermore, users will be able to submit clean up data which will later be added to the counters displayed on the page that will indicate the number of cigarette butts removed, number of volunteers who participated as well as the amount of water saved.

The team started by gathering information regarding the requirements of this project, then selected the stack of technologies that can best meet the requirements of the project. Initially, the team selected WordPress a web content management system written in PHP as one of the technologies that was to be used to develop the web application, at the request of the client. However, we encountered some challenges with WordPress. The team, in consultation with the project advisor and the client decided to move to a software stack which is composed of: PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and a MySQL database.

In addition, in consultation with Lisa, the website will be hosted under the domain, oceanicimpact.org. This new name aligns with the clients wish to further scale the organization globally, and since cigarette butts leach toxic chemicals into water, it also aligns with the current initiatives in place with the organization.

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