Showcasing Bristol's parks and green spaces
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Executive Summary
Created as part of the Bristol Green Capital Project, the Parkhive app showcases Bristol’s beautiful parks and green spaces. Using GPS to identify parks nearby, Parkhive offers residents and visitors key information about Bristol’s parks, encouraging people to explore new areas of the city. As well as providing information on how to get to the site, Parkhive also tells users the features of each park, including play areas, toilets, cafes, sports facilities, water features and more.
We decided to work with Calvium because they would provide a learning opportunity for our graduates to work with a leading tech company and learn app building skills. The app building process was collaborative, developed between our teams, and the opportunity to have a hands-on approach was a major draw for us. Calvium’s ethos is exactly in line with our organisation’s goal to build new relationships between the university and external partners, and the successful outcome of this project is an important example of that.
Challenges
Parkhive was delivered as a collaboration between the Bristol Parks Forum and the University of the West of England’s Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education. The Parkhive team wanted it to be possible for any member of the Bristol Parks Forum to submit information about their parks, ready to be added to the app. At the end of this process, the Parkhive team had gathered information from over 200 green spaces in and around Bristol, with photos and insights from local people. Managing this amount of information and ensuring it was inputted into the app reliably was a daunting task. The Parkhive team was therefore keen to work with a developer who had the tools to manage this process.
How Calvium Helped
The Parkhive team chose to work with Calvium because of our extensive portfolio of happy clients who have used our methods on similar projects. Over the years we have refined the process of working with content developers, so they can add in their own content to an app easily.
We found Calvium to be fun, professional and easy to engage with. They helped us overcome previous technical boundaries and have helped us expand our project and create a great app.
Result
The app was launched at Bristol Festival of Nature in June 2015 and received great reviews from attendees of the festival. It also earned the attention of The Observer and Bristol Post and was featured on BBC News coverage of the Festival of Nature.
News of the app reached the European Commission and received a fantastic write up on the European Green Capital Website. The team were extremely pleased with the finished app and are excited by it’s future potential to encourage people to visit green spaces in other parts of the country.
Download Bristol ParkHive for free on iOS and Android.
We’ve already had interest from a number of other councils to build similar park apps for their areas
Get in touch with Calvium to discuss any digital projects you have in mind.
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Environment Agency: market exploration consultancy
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