This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
I built CatColonyWatch, an open-source field-observation tool for volunteers and organisations that monitor community-cat colonies.
Its core idea is simple:
The AI is not watching the cats. The human is.
Community-cat monitoring happens outside: at feeding points, streets, gardens, courtyards, shelters, and other shared spaces.
But volunteers often need to do two things at once: pay attention to the animals and keep useful records.
CatColonyWatch is designed to make the screen the shortest part of that experience.
The workflow is:
The goal is not to automate animal observation.
The goal is to let people spend more time actually observing animals and less time organising notes.
CatColonyWatch currently supports:
The AI has deliberately narrow boundaries.
It does not diagnose animals, assess medical urgency, recommend treatments, or infer emotions or intentions.
Its job is much simpler:
help humans organise what they actually observed.
Streamlit demo:
https://catcolonywatch.streamlit.app/
The Streamlit version demonstrates the field-observation workflow and interface.
The complete AI workflow is intentionally designed to run locally through Ollama + Gemma 3 on the user's computer.
That means the public interface and the local AI architecture serve slightly different purposes:
The full local setup is documented in the repository.
The complete project is open source:
🐾 CatColonyWatch Observe first. Record second. Let open AI structure the notes CatColonyWatch is an open-source field-observation tool for volunteers and organisations that monitor community-cat colonies The AI is not watching the cats. The human is.
The app is designed to keep screen time short: volunteers observe cats and their environment first, record factual notes second, and then use a local open-weight AI model to structure those observations into a clearer record 🌿 How it works
Repository:
https://github.com/Maribele/CatColonyWatch
The repository includes:
app.py`` requirements.txt
Local databases and secrets are excluded from Git so real colony data is not accidentally published.
CatColonyWatch is built with:
The architecture is intentionally small:
text
Human field observation
↓
Streamlit interface
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Recorded visit
↓
Local Ollama server
↓
Gemma 3
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Structured JSON
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Human review
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SQLite / JSON / CSV