CivicActions

On June 15th, the Great Turtle Race 2008 reached its conclusion, after 14 days of people from across the world cheering on their favorite turtles. Organized by TOPP, NOAA, and Drexel University, the Race is a Flash application that processes data from tagged leatherbacks into an animated "turtle race". Leatherback turtles from the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea compete to reach the international date line or get the most "twirls", as many Indonesian turtles were busy searching for an appropriate nest during the race.

As Tech Lead for the project, I was responsible for taking the Flash application I'd developed with Jacob Singh for the 2007 Great Turtle Race, and making several enhancements. Beyond processing a new set of turtle data, the map had to support an extra "twirls" race, as well as new graphics. All in all, the work was fairly straightforward, thanks to some good planning a year before. Much thanks to Jenn Sramek for her amazing work (as usual) as Project Manager, who made sure the project remained focused during the tight deadlines.

The technology behind the race is fairly simple, and unusually for CivicActions, does not involve Drupal. The map itself is developed in Flash and uses several XML files for configuration, content, and turtle data, and a few custom PHP scripts are run on cronjobs to process the data files. Though all the turtle position data had already been recorded, the map had to slowly receive it to give the impression of the race unfolding over time. Security was very important, but not difficult with a few Apache directives and some creative scripting.

You can find out more about leatherback turtles, and many other amazing sea creatures (which may or may not be inclined to race) at the TOPP website.