[PROJECT] Hack the Cape Town Water Crisis

HACK THE CAPE TOWN WATER CRISIS

Local Organizer:Stop Reset Go and Cape Town Science Centre
When: Kickoff event: Feb 24, 25
Time 9am to 4pm each day

Where: Cape Town Science Centre

Why: Cape Town is suffering a major water crisis. Day Zero, the day the taps will turn off is projected to occur as early as April 2018. This hackathon is an event to crowdsource open source solution from innovators from around the globe.

Participant Instructions:

  1. Sign up to OSCEDays website
  2. Create a new project or join an existing one.
  3. Add your ideas and have fun!

Each project will have its own page and participants from all around the globe will share ideas on the thread of that page. It’s important to note that we encourage continuity or projects after the Hackathon is over. The Feb 24, 25 weekend is only to launch the ideation phase. Teams can continue working together after that, both locally and remotely to develop ideas into fully implementable solutions. Business incubators and investors have been invited to also participate and may fund promising projects. If you have need for resources, announce your needs on the thread.

Future Events: The hackathon is actually an ongoing series of hackathons. Real, practical and scaleable manufacturable solutions cannot be designed and built in one weekend, but requires a sustained effort.

Solution categories:

Solutions can be:

Timeframe

  • short term
  • medium term
  • long term

Approach

  • centralized
  • decentralized

Type

  • technology
  • behavioral change
  • policy change

Project types:

Water Loop water reuse technology
Water Loop is open source technology developed by Jason Selvarajan and his team in Finland. Jason has participated in past OSCEDays. The waterloop technology holds great promise to dramatically reduce water footprint. The showerloop website claims that a full waterloop system can reduce residiential water consumption from 120 L/day to 20 L/day. Our challenge will be to explore the waterloop technology with the aim of pushing the envelop of circular design to reduce cost and make waterloop an easy-to-install and low cost system accessible to everyone. It may require forking the hardware versions into many branches such as:

  1. middle income
  2. low income
  3. individual residence
  4. community

Examples of projects would be:

Constructed Wetlands
Constructed wetlands can clean and filter water that can then be reused for irrigation or for other residential use.

Dietary Change to flexitarian diet
Meat has such a high water footprint that even a slight reduction of meat in personal diet can have a profound effect on water consumption.

Water harvesting technologies
There is a plethora of distributed water harvesting technologies that can be built to serve an individual home or an entire community including:

  • passive air condensation technologies (fognets)
  • passive underground condensation technologies
  • rain harvesting
  • desalination
4 Likes

Hi Gien, could you place this as a [PROJECT] under the best fit activity: Materials, Places & Spaces, etc.? Thank you.

Sure. What do you think is best category?

Materials, for now. I asked Lars to add Water to this category so it becomes Water and Materials. Or we can find a better fit for Water, I’ll put it on the agenda for Jan 8, if we still need to find a place for water by then. Talk to you soon, Silvia

Should I just delete all the content here or is there a way to move it?

I’ll move it. (But you should be able to do it yourself. When you click on the pen next to the title you should be able to also change the category.

Thanks Lars. I can do it. I just needed to know the instructions.

I looked this video today about three thoughtful ways to conserve the water.

@Gien, do you know the lady who give the talk? Maybe there is a way for contact and cooperation

1 Like

Thanks for reminder Qing, i contacted her earlier and was awaiting her reply. I’ll give her a call on Monday.

1 Like

Hello, this project is wonderful! I can tell you that from Colombia, which in some cities is presenting a similar situation, we are very interested in participating. I have spoken with some universities (like professors working on the subject of sustainability) to develop it as an exercise within the courses and, in the process, help disseminate OSCED.

tomorrow I have a meeting of the network of professionals in sustainability in Colombia in which I would like to be able to present the topic and make the invitation to participate in these activities.

4 Likes

thanks for informing and inviting the whole international LeNS network (Learning Network on Sustainability), I’ve just received the email! I hope it is a fruitful collaboration among the network of design teachers, the international OSCE Days community and the local groups. :slight_smile:

1 Like

The content of this topic has been moved to Activities Water Hackathon, please make all your contributions there.