News from the CODATA community and from Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director
Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019
A Hackathon and Ideathon for Sustainable Africa
The IST-Africa 2019 conference, supported by the European Commission (EC) and the African Union Commission (AUC), addresses a series of societal challenges.
The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is a contribution to the joint efforts to solve these challenges. The hackathon addresses some of the key topics identified by the IST-Africa conference, such as agriculture, environmental sustainability, collaborative open innovation and ICT-enabled entrepreneurship.
The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is one of the satellite INSPIRE hackathons. The hackathon is organised in the frame of the IST Africa 2019 Conference. The hackathon is a collaborative event organised by Plan4all and Club of Ossiach associations and EU projects including EO4Agri, DataBio, NextGEOSS, EUXDAT, PoliVisu and AFarCloud.
DATES
The hackathon starts in March 2019 by creating hackathon teams. The hackathon will then run remotely until the event held on 10 May 2019 in Nairobi where the hackathon results will be presented within a workshop at IST Africa starting at 9am.
VENUE
The hackathon consists of two parts including:
a virtual period: The teams will work virtually led by the team mentors. Membership and participation in this part is open to all. There will be educational webinars during the virtual hackathon to facilitate the progress/collaboration.
a workshop (attendance optional for team members/participants) which is the closing event of the hackathon where the results of the hackathon will be presented. The workshop will take place in Laico Regency Hotel, Loita Street, Nairobi, which is located in the city centre. For more details, please visit the IST Africa website.
GOAL
The goal of the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is to build and strengthen relationships between several EU projects and African communities. This hackathon is not a competition. The focus is on building relationships, making rapid developments and collecting ideas for future research and innovation.
TEAMS & MENTORS
The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is organised using an unconventional approach, tailored to cater for cross-continental collaboration.
The hackathon starts with a set of predefined projects. Each project has a mentor (see the list of projects and mentors below). The participants of the hackathon can choose to work on any of the predefined projects. In this way, teams will be built to collaborate on the projects.
The mentors will organise the work and are responsible for the communication in the project teams and will act as team leaders.
The projects and their mentors for the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 include:
TEAM
PROJECT TITLE & DESCRIPTION
MENTORS
TEAM 1
Food Security in Relation to Earth Observation (GEOSS and COPERNICUS Relevance)
Explore the ways how to support agriculture in Africa at regional and local levels using Earth observation data and technologies. The gaol is not to transfer solutions from Europe to Africa. The goal is to find, develop or adapt solutions that will work in Africa.
Karel Charvat
TEAM 2
Climatic Services for Africa
When to start sowing or planting, when you need to irrigate fields or intervene in any way and how to increase the yield potential? These and similar question lead to the core of this team which is access and proper use of weather and other climate related data.
Karel Jedlicka
TEAM 3
Open Land Use for Africa (OLU4Africa)
The main aim is to explore open available data source that could be used for building OLU4Africa, extend the current database, build metadata and to build a community that will help to manage and improve the data and also to demonstrate the usability of OLU4Africa in practice.
Dmitrij Kozuch
TEAM 4
IoT Technologies for Africa
This team will explore available IoT networks, their coverage and available open data sources including data from meteorological stations, data on weather forecast, traffic cameras, public transport and agriculture phenomena. This team will also explore the way data can be exchanged between different sensor devices and platforms and stored using the SensLog 2.0.
Michal Kepka
TEAM 5
Agriculture Innovation Hub for Africa
The intention is to develop a social space for the African agriculture community to share knowledge and experience between farmers, industry, research community, advisory services and others involved.
Jiri Kvapil, Petr Uhlir, Karel Charvat
TEAM 6
Open Data and Data Sharing in Agri-Food Chains in Africa
This team will explore available data sources and data sharing practices between different stakeholders in the agri-food chain (farmers, service providers, advisors, food industry, machinery producers, etc.). This includes data catalogues, standards and data models that would work in Africa.
Raul Palma, Esther Dzalé Yeumo, Runar Bergheim, Karel Charvat
TEAM 7
Smart Points of Interest – Publication of Open Data in Africa as 5-star Linked Open Data
This team will analyse available data sources of points of interest in Kenya and other African countries. The data will be harmonised and published as linked open data as an extension of the Smart Points of Interest database.
Ota Cerba, Karel Charvat, Raul Palma
TEAM 8
Citizen Science in Africa to Ground Truth & Exploit Earth Observation data
In principle, there is great potential for citizen scientists – or the wider public – to validate what satellites observe or to put those images to use. In practice, the implementation of such ideas is faced by social, scientific, technical and economic challenges. This team will explore these challenges in order to develop ideas suitable for funding.
Uta Wehn, Raitis Berzins and Simon Leitgeb
TEAM 9
Open Transport Map (OTM) Applications for Africa
The aim is to demonstrate how interactive traffic modelling applications can improve traffic situation in African cities. The demonstration consists in gathering open data and deploying the traffic modelling tool in Nairobi.
You can join the teams mentioned above at any time between now and the end of April 2019. The registration is open to anyone from anywhere in the world as most of the hackathon is done virtually.
In case you will participate at the hackathon workshop within IST-Africa in Nairobi (10 May 2019), you need to register for the IST-Africa Conference itself.
TIMELINE
6 March 2019 – start of the hackathon, registration opens
(Beginning of April TBC) – a series of webinars introducing the teams and their progress. There are educational elements in these webinars.
1-7 May 2019 – preparing presentations for the workshop in Nairobi
10 May 2019 – presentation of the hackathon results at the workshop in Nairobi
ORGANISERS
Plan4all – Plan4all is a non-profit association sustaining and further enhancing the results of multiple research and innovation projects. It aggregates large open datasets related to planning activities in different specialisms areas transport, spatial and city planning, environment and tourism. Plan4all makes sure that open data are easily accessible for reuse, data are maintained and their quality is improved.
Club of Ossiach – The Club of Ossiach is a group of agriculturists, agribusiness managers, agriculture and forestry technologists, environmentalists and agricultural ICT specialists from around the world.
EO4Agri – The main objective of EO4AGRI is to catalyze the evolution of the European capacity for improving operational agriculture monitoring from local to global levels based on information derived from Copernicus satellite observation data and through exploitation of associated geospatial and socio-economic information services. EO4AGRI assists the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with special attention to the CAP2020 reform, to requirements of Paying Agencies, and for the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) processes.
DataBio – DataBio proposes to deploy a state of the art, big data platform “on top of the existing partners” infrastructure and solutions – the Big DATABIO Platform. The work will be continuous cooperation of experts from end user and technology provider companies, from bioeconomy and technology research institutes, and of other partners. In the pilots also associated partners and other stakeholders will be actively involved. The selected pilots and concepts will be transformed to pilot implementations utilizing co-innovative methods and tools where the bioeconomy sector end user experts and other stakeholders will give input to the user and sector domain understanding for the requirements specifications for ICT, Big Data and Earth Observation experts and for other solution providers in the consortium.
NextGEOSS – The NextGEOSS project will implement a federated data hub for access and exploitation of Earth Observation data, including user-friendly tools for data mining, discovery, access and exploitation. This data hub will be supported by a strong commitment to the engagement of Earth Observation and related communities, with the view of supporting the creation of innovative and business oriented applications.
EUXDAT – EUXDAT proposes an e-Infrastructure, which addresses agriculture, land monitoring and energy efficiency for a sustainable development, as a way to support planning policies. EUXDAT builds on existing mature components for solving them, by providing an advanced frontend, where users will develop applications on top of an infrastructure based on HPC and Cloud.
PoliVisu – Policy Development based on Advanced Geospatial Data Analytics and Visualisation. is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data. The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development.
AfriAlliance – Africa-EU Innovation Alliance for Water and Climate – Africa is one of the regions most in need of innovative solutions for tackling water and climate change-related challenges; yet many parts of Africa are also suffering from the lack of water-related skills and capacity as well as wide-spread institutional fragmentation. AfriAlliance aims to better prepare Africa for future climate change challenges by having African and European stakeholders work together in the areas of water innovation, research, policy, and capacity development. One of the objectives of AfriAlliance is to help improve water and climate monitoring and forecasting processes and tools in Africa. AfriAlliance is developing a triple sensor approach, combining input from 1) remote sensors (satellite, drones, etc.), 2) in-situ sensors (e.g. official weather stations) and 3) human sensors (e.g. citizens’ own mobiles devices and private weather stations) and co-locating these in an online GeoDataPortal.
CSEOL – Citizen Science Earth Observation Lab – The potential of using Citizen Science (CS) approaches and new digital technologies in a suitable setting for experimenting and generating new Earth Observation (EO) products and services is faced with various challenges. The Citizen Science Earth Observation Lab (CSEOL) therefore facilitates an open innovation process for generating multiple ideas on how to explore the CS potential for validating and exploiting EO data towards concrete, implementable projects. The CSEOL Call for Ideas is open now, on how to involve citizen scientists and the wider public in validating and exploiting Earth Observation data (deadline 5 May 2019).
AFarCloud – AFarCloud will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming, which will allow the integration and cooperation of Cyber Physical Systems in real-time for increased agriculture efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduced farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making, based on big data and real time data mining techniques.
A Hackathon and Ideathon for Sustainable Africa
