Water Accounting Plus

WaPOR Hackathon 2023

The second edition of the #WaPORhackathon concluded on 26 October 2023! During the first week 11 teams presented their pictures. Watch them here.

During the final event, five teams presented their extended pitches. Watch them here

Are you familiar with the WaPOR data and want to create innovative ideas using this data?? Then join the “WaPOR Hackathon - WaPOR: Communicating data for agricultural applications”, brought to you by the WaPOR Project.

This hackathon is the second from a series of three hackathons. The first WaPOR Hackathon, which focussed on monitoring and evaluating global challenges and took place in December 2022. You can check all the news and updates on the Water Accounting web page.

The hackathon focuses on bringing together (social) scientists, engineers, programmers, communications specialists, and local experts to create real-world applications using WaPOR remote sensing derived data as standalone or combined with other data sources.
The focus is on advisory and communication to the agriculture sector using storytelling and linking WaPOR data to other data sources to enhance its applicability. The outputs could include mobile phone applications, GIS plug-ins, web maps, dashboards or whatever your creativity wants! This year’s main theme for the hackathon is WaPOR: Communicating data for agricultural applications and will work under the following subthemes 3 themes:

  1. Story telling with WaPOR data
  2. Linking WaPOR to other data sources (e.g. Internet of Things, Citizen science, remote sensing, etc)
  3. Advisory and communication to the agriculture sector

Each team will develop an idea on how WaPOR data (in combination with other data sources) can be used to communicate on different topics or to provide advisory services to the agricultural sector. This will be done with support from a team of experts in various fields. After week 1 of the hackathon, each team will prepare a 1-minute video pitch for their concept to the jury who will select one winner from each theme. The winning teams have an extra week to develop their concept further with advice from industry experts. The final winning team will have the chance to have their product supported by the WaPOR Project for implementation!

Why this challenge?

The world faces many challenges brought on by our increasing demand for food, comfort, and a resource-intensive quality of life. Climates are changing, non-renewable resources are depleting and two of our most essential resources, land and water, are deteriorating. To tackle these challenges, there is much potential in using big data. The WaPOR portal, uses open-source data to provide near real-time spatial datasets for Africa and the Near East, and is now going global! The WaPOR data can monitor agriculture, agricultural water consumption, water productivity, and much more. With all this data available, the challenge is how to put it into practice and have it easily accessible for users.
We want to challenge you to think of ways how to move from WaPOR data and other linked open data sets to useful, easy, and accessible technical applications - think of apps, QGIS-plugins, web-services, processes, decision support systems, and more! We also want you to think out of the box and think of ways of using WaPOR data for objectives that might have not been in the initial objective of WaPOR – think about storytelling, monitoring, communication and other.

Important dates

  • Tuesday 3 October 2023 – Pre-opening event for registered participants 
  • Thursday 12 October 2023 – Opening Event: Launch of the WaPOR Hackathon with Key Note speakers
  • Thursday 19 October 2023 – Closing of Week 1: Screening of team pitches and announcement of shortlisted teams
  • Thursday 26 October 2023 – Closing event for the WaPOR Hackathon (screening of short listed team pitches and announcement of final winner)

Requirements and Registration

You can register with a team or sign up as an individual and be paired up with colleagues from around the world.
Requirements for registration: Basic knowledge of WaPOR.  We advise you to check the available course on WaPOR on IHE OpenCourseWare:

  1. Water Productivity and Water Accounting using WaPOR (complete at least Module 1 of the course). This course is available in English, French and Arabic.
  2. WaPOR Concepts and Validation

Professionals and students are encouraged to apply. See you at the hackathon!

Please follow this link to register for the Hackathon – WaPOR Hackathon 2023

Inspiration

WaPOR Hackathon 2022 – You can watch the final pitches here
WaterPIP Hackathon 2020 – You can watch the winning pitch here
Team 17: WAPlugin. The WaPlugin team managed to turn their idea into reality with the official launch of the WaPlugin 2.0 at the open data day 2022.

Future events

Under the WaPOR project, one more hackathon will be planned for 2024, with the potential of a Hackathon fest in the Netherlands with the winning and most active teams from the 3 hackathons. Now with WaPOR going global, new opportunities will rise and new ideas will be needed for the future. We encourage you to follow the updates on WaPOR and stay tuned for new events.

The WaPOR project

Achieving Food Security in the future while using water resources in a sustainable manner is a major challenge for us and the next generations. Agriculture being a key water user, a careful monitoring of water productivity in this sector and exploring opportunities to increase it are required. The FAO has developed a publicly accessible near real time database using satellite data that allows the monitoring of agricultural water productivity at different scales. This database is the backbone of the WaPOR project that, now in its second phase, works with ten partner countries to build their capacity in the use of WaPOR data for its different applications, and to generate solutions to local challenges linked to water and land productivity as well as water management.

This hackathon is brought to you by the WaPOR Project partners, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in collaboration with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and International Water Management Institute (IWMI). This event is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.

Organised by:                              In collaboration with:

               

Contact organizers: wateraccounting_project@un-ihe.org