How open source can help society


Problem

Few months ago football club AS Roma started including pictures of missing children in social media posts announcing new signings.

Some screenshots:

image

image

Some useful links:

Idea

I thought we have something similar in Canada?

And the answer is yes - https://missingkids.ca

This is the website with online data across Canada.

MissingKids.ca is owned and operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. As Canada’s missing children resource centre, MissingKids.ca offers families support in the search for their missing child and provides educational resources to help prevent children from going missing.

But if you want to get some missing people recap image/profile?

Actually it’s not easy - you should visit each page, click special link etc

So my idea is - we can create special software to get all the info from this datasource (and add some new sources in the future) and provide API access which can:

  • Provide special URL (maybe with additional params for country/region/city etc)
  • Randomly visit data sources from the configuration file (as example)
  • Randomly collect all the data from pages and generate one image per each request

So, based on that - people can add images to social networks and share / probably help someone.

API usage example

GET http://localhost:3000/api/generator

Response example:

image

Implementation

Stay tuned for the next post!