> Every spring, fish swim right through Utrecht, looking for a place to spawn and reproduce. Some swim all the way to Germany. There is a problem, however: they often have to wait a long time at the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the inner city, as the lock rarely opens in spring. We have come up with a solution: the fish doorbell! An underwater camera has been set up at the lock, and the live feed is streamed to the homepage. If you see a fish, press the digital fish doorbell. The lock operator is sent a signal and can open the lock if there are enough fish. Now you can help fish make it through the canals of Utrecht.
So unless there are people watching and alerting them (free labor) the fish don't get to procreate? That's a lot of responsibility.
It's so nice that they found a way to offload the externalities of running a lock without having to spend any money themselves, let the public do it. A playful implementation of "privatize profits, socialize losses". Why pay someone to actually watch the feed and react when appropriate if they can gameify and let the people do it.
> So unless there are people watching and alerting them (free labor) the fish don't get to procreate?
The lock opens roughly once per day - more often if it's busy. Once the boating season starts, fish will piggyback off of that.
It's not this hard to help fish pass a man-made obstacle. They chose to do it this way for public awareness. Leave off the public awareness goal and suddenly there are way easier, less involved methods.
This is way more for raising awareness about the impact of locks and dams on fish migration than for the actual effect of this system on fish migration.
> Why pay someone to actually watch the feed and react when appropriate.
There is a an operator who gets final say. This way that person doesn’t have to be driven insane with the mind numbing excruciatingly boring job of watching empty water all day.
Plus, it gets the public involved in something positive that will both entertain them and get them to think more about our impact as humans.
Sounds to me like a good way of building a high quality CV model with limited resources.
Its not apparent as an end user if the signal to the lock operator is another human or a well trained model. And at the end of the day, if there is a human checking on it, does it really matter?
Of course I'd rather they do it this way than not at all. It's just so sad how unsustainable it is. It's great that there is so much interest, at least right now, I could only get a read-only spot in the feed.
It's been around for years, how is it not sustainable!
I get it may not be sustainable, but is computer hardware and electricity sustainable? What about the maintenance and cost of those? This is a great solution. Beautiful. I feel like hugging this solution, as if I should bed it, and produce efficient, beautiful, socially wondrous offspring!
This reads like a very cynical take on the matter. It kind of suggests that general public should never be asked to do anything. Always hire someone for that particular thing. (help keeping cleanliness by picking random trash, report a crime or a suspicious object, paint some public walls). Some things can done better if crowd sourced and sometimes and it can be just for fun.
So unless there are people watching and alerting them (free labor) the fish don't get to procreate? That's a lot of responsibility.
It's so nice that they found a way to offload the externalities of running a lock without having to spend any money themselves, let the public do it. A playful implementation of "privatize profits, socialize losses". Why pay someone to actually watch the feed and react when appropriate if they can gameify and let the people do it.