WeTap Public Drinking Fountain Application

WeTap: An Exciting New Opportunity for Public Drinking Water Fountains

The Pacific Institute, in collaboration with Google, is preparing to launch an exciting new smartphone applications (app) that could help address a major water challenge: finding, supporting, and expanding the nation’s public drinking water fountains.

The new application, under development initially for Android-capable phones, is called WeTap. It does two things:

1. Permits smartphone users to add public drinking water fountains to a national database of fountains, with information on their location, condition, and quality, including uploading a photo; and

2. Permits smartphone users to find a working fountain when they want one.

The app is under development and will be available for beta-testing in late April for a set of volunteers with four things:

1. An Android-capable smartphone

2. A gmail account.

3. A Picasa photo account (to permit them to upload photos of water fountains).

4. A willingness to test the application by finding water fountains, uploading them to the database and core map, and provide feedback on the application so we can improve it.

Interested in helping and meet the conditions above? Send an email to info@pacinst.org.

Peter Gleick discusses the need for a drinking fountain renassance…

 

One of the reasons for the explosive growth in the sales of bottled water in the past two decades (the average American now drinks nearly 30 gallons of commercial bottled water per year, up from 1 gallon in 1980), is the disappearance of public drinking water fountains.

Read more:   http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail?entry_id=72937