There’s been an ongoing trend on Reddit and Instagram— the #Trashtag !

People are going out to heavily polluted areas, picking up trash, and posting proud selfies with mountains of trash. The momentum has been inspiring, making it one of my favorite viral movements in a very long time.

How can we keep this going for months and years to come?

With maps!

Use canvis to organize local cleanups

Community cleanup efforts make a great use case for collaborative and crowd-sourced mapping. Ultimately, all we want to know is the following:

1. Where are some places that need to be cleaned up?
2. Where are the places that have been cleaned up already?

Collaborative maps are a perfect medium for these messages. And by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd, we can keep an up to date overview of the entire project area!

Just create a canvis project, give it a collaborative mapping page, and give it two layers: Needs Clean Up, and Cleaned Up. Then choose a study area, type in some background info, and you are good to go!

Keep it local.

Some entrepreneurs and organizations have gone out of their way to build global apps for trash pickup and reporting. Unfortunately these apps have failed to gain significant traction.

Ultimately, we think canvis.app is a better platform for this, because it lets you quickly launch custom projects specifically for your community. We find that people are far more invested in local, bottom-up projects as opposed to global campaigns.

Every canvis project is associated with a ‘study area’. This is simple a location you provide, which (if you want) we use to show relevant projects to visitors of our homepage. This makes it easier to find new participants, and to keep people coming back.

Keep it relevant.

If you want your local cleanup effort to succeed, the collaborative map is just a small part of it.

No movement is successful without the help existing networks. Take the time to identify other stakeholders and organizations who might be interested in helping. These people can help moderate the canvis project, find new participants, and spread the word.

Most importantly, people are far more willing to participate when they know who is invested in the project!

Launch now!

What are you waiting for? It only takes a few minutes to build and launch a canvis project. Then you can share the link with people who you think might want to join in.

Need help? I’m here for you! I’d be proud to work with local non-profits and community groups, or motivated individuals like yourself.

brendan@canvis.app