You're in a new city and enjoying the sights on foot, public transportation, or bicycle. You're also one of those staunch travelers who packs your own drinking water. And not the plastic, over-the-counter, bottled stuff, either. No, you carry your H 2 O in your own container. But you are constantly frustrated by the scarcity of public drinking fountains in many urban places in the United States.

What you'd really like is a click-and-go online source for where the nearest public water cooler is. The good news is that there's a Android application for that. It's a collaborative app called WeTap, being developed by Google and the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. The driving force behind the idea is Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story of Our Obsession with Bottled Water.

"Where have all our drinking water fountains gone?" Gleick laments. "They have been disappearing, one by one, from our public spaces, parks, offices. And yet, it has become easier and easier to find expensive and environmentally damaging commercial bottled water. Safe, free drinking water used to be common: we all used public water fountains. Now they are hard to find, dirty, or broken."

Calling all volunteers

Gleick estimates that the typical water-craving American now buys and slurps down almost 30 gallons of commercially bottled fare a year. That's thirty times the amount of water purchased by the typical American in 1980. "One of the reasons for this explosive growth in the sales of bottled water is the disappearance of public drinking water fountains," he notes.

The Pacific Institute says that WeTap will provide a national database of fountains, with ready intel on the human-made spring's location, condition, and quality. Entries will come with comments and photos.

But there's a catch, of course. In order to create this application, WeTap will depend on crowdsourcing, and that means the project needs volunteers to actually go out and log in the details of all those public fountains into the database. So if you want WeTap to work, you're just going to have to join the water-seeking WeTap team. Recruits will need the following things:

1. An Android-capable smartphone 2. A Gmail account. 3. A Picasa photo account (to permit them to upload photos of water fountains). 4. A willingness to test the application by finding water fountains, uploading them to the database and core map, and provide feedback on the application so we can improve it.

The rest of the details are here. The first crowdsourcing campaign is taking place in Berkeley, California.