# CatColonyWatch: Local Open AI for Community Cat Field Observation

> Source: <https://dev.to/frmabel/catcolonywatch-local-open-ai-for-community-cat-field-observation-44gm>
> Published: 2026-10-08 21:12:56+00:00

*This is a submission for the [Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week1-2026-10-05)*

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/](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](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
        ↓
Recorded visit
        ↓
Local Ollama server
        ↓
Gemma 3
        ↓
Structured JSON
        ↓
Human review
        ↓
SQLite / JSON / CSV
```