Lightning Mapper

What inspired you to build Lightning Mapper?

My main motivation was to take advantage of the learning environment that hackathons provide. I decided to build Lightning Mapper because of my background in geographic information systems. I had recently been using the mobile app "MapSwipe", where users volunteer their time to indicate whether or not certain features exist in portions of satellite images. When I saw the theme was "social good", I decided to implement a similar model to MapSwipe in the browser using Lightning payments to incentivize users.

In three sentences or less, tell us about your project.

In Lightning Mapper, users are paid to view satellite imagery and digitize features, such as roads and buildings, by drawing over them in the map. The digitized features can be used to help humanitarian groups locate people in need. Users can withdraw their earnings via Lightning Network at any time.

How did you build Lightning Mapper?

I built Lightning Mapper using a combination of open source tools: Blockstack Auth for authentication, Leaflet.js for mapping, NodeJS for webserver, Python and c-lightning for processing Lightning invoices and payments.

What were the biggest development challenges?

My background is not in software development, so learning to piece the different components together was challenging.

What operational challenges have you run into since launch?

Finding the time to finish the project.

What are your plans for the project post hackathon?

Unfortunately I wont be able to spend a lot of time working on Lightning Mapper in the near future, so I plan to shelve it for a bit. I will eventually finish and publish the source code, and potentially do a public launch if there is demand.

What projects are you most excited about this next year?

I'm most excited for the continuing work on the Lightning protocol itself as well as the major implementations. It's very important for these to be working well to have a healthy Lightning Network, and there is some exciting development coming in the next year!

Where can we find code or working application of your project?

Unfortunately it isn't ready to be released yet. When I do release it, I will be announcing it on my Twitter account @billy_btc.