Shade Tree Streamliner
Project Description
The Shade Tree Committee is a group of five volunteers, with the responsibility of working with the Borough to ensure that property owners comply with regulations regarding planting and removal of trees, as well as coordinating plantings in public spaces and assisting in the process for maintaining Lewisburg’s status as a “Tree City USA” member. The group operates with little resources, and it has proven challenging to keep abreast of all of the trees in need of removal, properties that are being required to remove/plant trees, etc. Bill is interested in working with students to do develop a system (possibly an app, for example) to better track this data, and to help us streamline our communications with property owners and citizens.
Group Summary
A local volunteer group is interested in working with students in tracking their data and streamlining their communication with their clients. Their business includes ensuring property owners comply with local regulations and planning plantings in town. Their biggest problem is keeping abreast in tracking the trees and properties that need to remove trees.
Identified Pains
The volunteers have troubles communicating with their clients and tracking trees around town, especially as a small team. They also probably have trouble keeping track with when to update their entries on specific trees.
Proposed Problem Description
The Shade Tree Committee is trying to organize themselves so marking/tracking a tree for removal and communicating with property owners moves faster.
Proposed Goals
They are possibly using too large of scale solution (an app) to fix smaller scale problems. Communication with property owners should be done through email/letters, since an app adds extra hurdles and layers. Equipping the volunteers with better, existing tools would help solve their problems. Tools that would help include directories of clients, a better communication platform like an automated email server, a shared server for photos of trees like an iphoto library (which includes locations of where picture was taken), and databasing tools for organization and historical data.
Contributors
Stefano Cobelli, Andrew Capuano, Brooke Bullek, Daniel Vasquez
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Brainstorm!
Contribute: Cole Whitley, Jordan Faith, Levi Adair, Anushika
take aways: Home owners should be more cognizant of the rules, it would be nice if trees automatically reported data, it would be nice if no trees ever had to be removed
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