Hive Census App - where in the world is Hive?

I’d like to invite you to help me build a geographical map of the Hive community. It takes less than a minute, requires no registration and the only thing you need is Hive Keychain.

https://app.hive-census.workers.dev/

Why?

During the last non-HiveFest Unconference in Barcelona, I tried to sound people out about the possibility of organising a HiveBeeCon or another HiveFest in Poland, preferably somewhere as close to Silesia as possible. I won’t hide the fact that it would simply be much easier for me to get actively involved if it were closer to home.

One of my arguments in favour of organising a HiveFest here was the number of Hive users in Silesia and Poland as a whole. I pointed to @hivebeecon as an example — it managed to attract nearly 100 people on two occasions. What is more the HiveFest held in Kraków Poland has been the biggest one in attendance terms.

The discussion made me think: Do we actually know where the Hive community is?

This app obviously won’t produce comprehensive or statistically representative data. Participation is voluntary, so there will always be a selection bias. But with enough declarations, it might still give us an interesting picture of Hive’s geographical footprint.

And that picture could potentially be useful.
If the quantity and quality of the data allow us to draw any meaningful conclusions, it could help us identify places where organising a HiveFest, HiveBeeCon, meetup or another community event might make sense.
It could also provide some useful context when planning geographically targeted marketing campaigns. Instead of treating the whole world equally, we could see where Hive already has clusters of active users and where strengthening an existing community might have the greatest impact.
And that picture could potentially be useful.

And there is a much simpler use case:
Who else is around me?
Perhaps there are ten, twenty or fifty Hive users somewhere near you and you simply don’t know about each other. The map could make it easier to discover local Hive communities, organise small meetups or simply ping people from a particular area when something relevant is happening nearby.

How does the app work?

The current version requires the use of Hive Keychain. The app generates a custom JSON that looks roughly like this:

{
  "v": 1,
  "action": "set",
  "country": "PL",
  "country_name": "Poland",
  "region": "PL-24",
  "region_name": "Silesian Voivodeship",
  "city": "Katowice",
  "lat": 50.2599,
  "lon": 19.0216
}

In practice, this means that I don’t create or maintain any user database of my own. Your declaration is signed by your account and stored on the Hive blockchain as a custom_json operation. The app simply reads these declarations and displays them on the map.

The app does not access your GPS location or track your location in any way. You choose the place you want to be associated with — it can be a city rather than your actual place of residence. The information is self-declared and public, as it is stored on the Hive blockchain.

Remember, as always, there's a risk factor involved, but you might set a different city next to yours to generally show your location without any personal data revealing.

Future plans or ideas:

• Geographical statistics — country, region and city rankings showing how many Hive users are located in each area.
• Marker clustering — grouping nearby locations when the map becomes more populated, keeping it readable even with hundreds or thousands of users.
• Clickable Hive profiles — usernames displayed on the map could link directly to their Hive profiles.
• Shareable locations — direct links to a particular city or region on the map, useful for Hive posts and discussions.
• Community distribution statistics — Top Countries, Top Regions, Top Cities and other statistics showing where the Hive community is concentrated.
• Open data export — easy access to Census data in JSON or CSV, allowing other Hive developers to build their own tools and visualisations.
• Radius analysis for events — checking how many declared Hive users are located within, for example, 50, 100 or 250 km of a selected city. This could make the Census genuinely useful when deciding where to organise a HiveFest, HiveBeeCon, meetup or other community event.

The broader goal is to move from a simple map towards a tool that can show where the Hive community is concentrated and help the community make practical decisions based on that geographical distribution.

Your comments

Perhaps the name “Census” is a bit of an overstatement, since for now it only covers your self-declared location on the world map. But maybe you have some ideas about what features could be added to expand it.
Or perhaps you have some other feedback or suggestions about the project — the comments are all yours.

Test it, break it, and I’ll just pray that my agent can handle whatever you throw at it.

https://app.hive-census.workers.dev/