Three days of online mobilization with data cached through Amazon Web Services
By: Mikel Maron
“Social distancing doesn’t mean that we should disengage from collective action!” — Earth Day Live
This week, millions will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Normally that would mean gathering together in cities across the country to demand climate action. This year, however, is anything but normal.
Instead of mass protests, from April 22 to 24, youth and adult activists are coming together for Earth Day Live, a three-day live stream of training, performances and speakers focused on climate action. Sign up to view the live stream and spread the word.
Their map of local livestreams collects the efforts of hundreds of youth organizers, climate justice activists and frontline communities across the U.S. Find a livestream near you and click through to tune in.
Building a map to scale
Earth Day Live uses ActionNetwork to organize its campaign, but the team needed to protect access to the data and make it scale. So Arindam Bose from our GL JS team volunteered and built the initial version that caches map data from the ActionNetwork API on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and we worked with our friends at the Future Coalition and Town Hall Project to pivot the map from offline to online organizing.
The technical approach is very similar to Sheet Mapper Advanced: Caching, which builds on Sheet Mapper, a simple tool for creating maps with Google Sheets. Modest changes allow the system to serve map data from AWS instead of a spreadsheet, which lets the map scale for much larger audiences.
To build your own, follow the step-by-step guide, and walk through setting up an AWS account, sharing Google Sheets as a CSV, configuring S3 to serve public data, and building a Lambda function to cache data hourly. From there, you can try this same approach with other databases or backend solutions, as Earth Day Live does with ActionNetwork.
Check out the Sheet Mapper Advanced: Caching impact tool and reach out to the Community team if you need support for environmental justice, COVID-19 or other social impact projects.
Maps feature data from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap and their data partners.
Earth Day Live’s map of local livestreams was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.