Couple of people have been asking what EcoMo was and why I've been wittering on about it on Twitter on Friday night/Saturday morning. Well, it was a 24-ish-hour developer camp/competition being run from Friday at 6pm through to 3-4pm on Saturday. (We were kinda "hands down" at about 1:30pm, so call it 18-19 hours allowing for initial socialising). It was being run by Vodafone and Betavine (Vodafone's mobile developer community site) with a theme of "green/sustainable". Most of the projects were carrot/stick jobs - either making it easier to find stuff (One group was working with Green Maps, others did some work with making Freecycle and it's ilk easier to search and discover stuff on) or making your impact clearer (the carbon.to group made it possible to see kgs of CO2 as other things like beers, carrots or underground journeys to make things "more real"). They provided a space, internet, food and drink and basically just let us go do our thing.
I didn't have much of a clue what to do to be honest. I spent the first hour or two just chatting to people, trying to look for a team I could help with, and there were a lot of interesting ideas floating around. At some point I had the idea of doing a site that would help you see what the cost was of a particular journey for different modes of transport. So take location A and location B and show the costs - money, environmental impact, time - for different modes of transport - initially just planes and trains, but then other forms as well.
I spent a bunch of time to start with checking all the data was available (even if needed scraping), and only really started coding about 1am. Things learnt this weekend include that Red Bull is vital in these situations. I used the Yahoo Geocoding API to get locations from whatever strings users gave me, then scraped Google Maps for travel distances (admittedly for cars, but a reasonable first approximation to trains). Using the AMEE data for carbon footprints, I could then get approximate CO2 values for planes/trains (assuming there's trains everywhere, and airports outside your front door). I then scraped ebookers for plane times/prices (bit unreliable and darn slow, but got some data). I also used carbon.to's data for "bottles of beer equivalents" to the CO2.
This is all now available at http://tc.tevp.net/ (which redirects to Google AppEngine for the hosting for the moment, but that might change later on). There was then the judging, and I somehow (against competition of lots of much shiner things) managed to not only be one of the runners-up in the main competition, I also jointly won the "People's Choice" award (voted for by all the developers there), which is kinda kick arse! I won a Nokia 6210 and a Vodafone 3G dongle, which is not bad.
Things for the future:
There's also various photos up - both mine and others on Flickr