Water Accounting Plus

WaPOR Hackathon 2022

The first online #WaPORhackathon has been concluded

268 participants from 58 countries registered, 30 teams were formed, 13 teams prepared initial 1-min pitches, 6 teams were shortlisted and five team submitted the final pitch with one overall winner!! Team 16 from Sudan won with their ideas for developing apps for farmer advisory services in Sudan.

  • The recording of the opening session can be found here.
  • You can watch the 13 pitches and announcement of the shortlisted teams here.
  • The pitches of the finalists and announcement of the winning team video

We will be back in 2023 with the second edition of the WaPOR hackathon! Keep posted by following our twitter account. 

What it was all about:

First WaPOR Hackathon: WaPOR for Monitoring and evaluation of global challenges 

Are you a hackathon expert? Or maybe you want to attend your first one? We are happy to invite you to join the “WaPOR Hackathon: Monitoring and Evaluating global challenges”, brought to you by the WaPOR Project.

This hackathon is the first from a series of three hackathons which will follow in the coming 2 years. This hackathon focuses on bringing together (social) scientists, engineers, programmers, communications specialists, and local experts to create real-world applications using WaPOR remote sensing data (wapor.apps.fao.org). Outputs could include phone applications, GIS plug-ins, web maps, or whatever your creativity wants! The hackathon focused on 4 themes:

  • Environmental challenges (climate hazard, land degradation, ..)
  • Monitoring the SDGs
  • Tools to Validate WaPOR data
  • Social Inclusion, gender and equity

Each team will develop an idea on how WaPOR data can be used to solve a problem within one of the themes, with support from a team of experts in various fields. After 1 week, each team will pitch their concept to the jury who will select one winner from each theme. The winning teams will then have 10 days 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. For example, the WaPOR portal, uses open-source data to provide near real-time spatial datasets for Africa and the Near East (and now going global!) which 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, ie. to put it to use in such a way that users can easily access and use the data that is of importance to them.
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, decision support systems, and more!

Important dates (livestream events)

  • Wednesday 30 November 2022 – Launch of the hackathon 
  • Thursday 8 December 2022 – screening of team pitches and announcement of shortlisted teams 
  • Friday 16 December 2022 - Closing event for the Hackathon (incl screening of pitches and announcement of final winner)

Inspiration from WaterPIP Hackathon 2020 - Results

The pitches from the finalists were so good, the jury chose 2 winners! You can watch the final 5-minute pitches from the winning teams.
Team 4: WaPOR for sustainable Ecosystem Management
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, two more hackathons will be planned in the coming 2 years. 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