OpenHack is an Open Source hackathon organized by Engineers Without Borders Sweden (EWB). We want to help utilize the power of technical solutions that can solve humanitarian or social challenges. We are organizing a hackathon in Luleå, Sweden the 9-11th of March and want to support the Water Hackathon by presenting some cases from the Cape Town water crisis for the participants to solve. Feel free to sugest possible topics we could work with during the hackathon!
On behalf of the entire community, I want to thank Openhack for your participation and comradry to support us here!
We are piloting the GLocal model of Massive Open Online Citizen’s Collaboration (MOOCC). Imagine a massive network of skilled commoners who can rove from one location of the world, or one theme, to help solve critical world problems.And also image if we can form local innovation hubs all over the globe that share in a common design commons of useful designs. We could actually all become local peer production centers run as production cooperatives. @adam founded Enkel and his model seems a good one to replicate around the globe.Can we create a solidarity network such that each is a cooperative production centre?
I’ve already been telling the community about Openhack! Please browse the awesome list of growing projects! Look at @Cindy project. There’s also one for mapping boreholes and wellpoints to see how much water is being sucked out of the ground. I wonder if there’s a tech that can detect and tell if there’s an illegal borehole or wellpoint? Any sensors sensitive enough to detect changes and microflows of water movement in soils some distance away? I wonder if plant root systems can tell and how spatially sensitive their tap roots are to water?
To my mind the real gap is not the people or the ideas, it is how we collect and curate the knowledge and enable peer to peer sharing.
A couple of us in different parts of the world are talking together about what the information architecture would look like and what platform might be best.
This sort of functionality - https://thewaternetwork.com/ - could be good if it was simpler, cleaner and more social. Does anyone have know of any good systems or examples we could explore?
We in OpenHack admire all the work you guys are doing here. I am hopeful we can work together and feature more topics here on our hackathons.
On how to collect and curate the knowledge, this could be something to lift during our hackathon. I can not think of an example right away but I will try to think of something we could explore.
@DavidOH Thanks for your vote of confidence! We’ll get further along this next fortnight. So we’ll be ready for more input by yours. When do you need you hackathon projects loaded?
