Building a Healthier Planet with Open Source Software

Happy Earth Day, one and all 🌍

Each year on Earth Day (April 22), our team takes a moment to pause and think about our individual and collective impact on the planet we all share with one another — and the flora and fauna that call Earth home.

Today, we also celebrate Sloan the Three-Toed Sloth: our beloved mascot, part-time community moderator, and publisher of anonymous posts here on DEV. If you ever want to post something but don't necessarily want your name attached, Sloan is your gal. That's a lot of responsibility for a mammal that moves at 0.24 km/h (0.15 mph)!

Sloths like Sloan typically live in the lowland, tropical jungles of Central and South America — so we're pretty grateful that she spends so much time hanging out with us on DEV.

This year, we asked Sloan how she wanted to celebrate Earth Day. She's still recovering from the exertion of our 2020 celebration (featuring an interview with Dr. Rebecca Cliffe, one of the world’s leading experts on sloths!) So today, she asked us to pass the microphone to our community...

Sloan's request: Share your favorite open source projects that benefit the environment in the comments below

Sloan knows that software developers can have a meaningful impact on the world we live in. Nothing demonstrates that more strongly than the commitment of the open source community to share knowledge freely and improve codebases with wide technical input. There are so many open source projects that exist to serve the environment, and many of them are actively seeking contributors like you!

A few of our favorite environmental open source projects include...

• Rainforest Connection (RFCx) — A non-profit tech startup building scalable, open source solutions to illegal logging, poaching, and environmental threats.
• Trends.earth — a QGIS plugin that supports monitoring of land change, including changes in productivity, land cover, and soil organic carbon.
• Awesome Earth - A bank of resources, services, products, and ideas that help fight the negative impact of climate change.

Plus, the winners of our Hack the Planet contest with New Relic built some pretty incredible tools including...

• A website that uses open data to demonstrate the effect of climate change in Peru
• An app that uses historical weather data to show today's average temperature in your city
• A tool that rewards users for educating themselves on the climate crisis through Spotify podcasts

What about you? What are your favorite sustainability/climate change-focused open source projects? How can the DEV Community contribute? ​

💚 With Earth Day love from Sloan and the DEV team