Hackathon 2019 - TheWaterChannel

Generating-data driven solutions in Lebanon

Host: American University of Beirut; Outreach support provided by: Berytech and AUB-iPark
Organisers: IHE-Delft, MetaMeta, Wageningen University and Eleaf

Supported by: The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Agriculture and water are invariably connected. As the world’s population continues to increase, food production needs to follow, along with demand for water in agriculture. As demand for water increases, its availability to individual users will become more and more uncertain. Adding to the uncertainty is climate change resulting in increasingly erratic rainfall and more intense heat waves.

Call for Action

Lebanon, known as a country with abundant water resources, is facing serious challenges in meeting the water needs for all sectors. For the agriculture sector this means it needs to reduce water use while ensuring higher production and income for farmers.

This calls for a focus on increasing water productivity and rethinking of farming and irrigation practice, input supply, services provision, and knowledge and information sharing. The launch of the latest version of the Water Productivity Open-access portal (WaPOR) in June 2019 that provides reliable, objective and free high-resolution data on essential agriculture performance indicators is an opportunity to benefit from innovative satellite derived information.

We invite you, farmer, communication expert, graphic designer, policy maker, student, wholesaler, researcher, input provider, ICT developer to join our Hackathon event and team up to:

Use WaPOR to develop water productivity solutions such as mobile and other applications,

to support farmers and the broader agricultural sector

What the hackathon?

Hacking is creative problem solving. The Water Productivity Hackathons involves building applications based on the WaPOR database. To bring out your brightest ideas you the participants are organised into teams and thrust through the ins and outs of water productivity, the WaPOR database, open sourcing, graphic design and more. Then get your laptops out and come up with WaPOR-based solutions to agriculture and water productivity challenges—management solutions, technical tools, or decision support systems.

Prize

Participation in the hackathon will not go unawarded. All teams will pitch their ideas to a distinguished jury. The winner will be awarded half-a-year of technical guidance and support from our experts on water, agriculture, remote sensing and GIS and coding to further develop their winning idea.

Resources

The best brains from the fields of remote sensing, water productivity, open source modelling, GIS, agri-innovations and business will be guiding you at the hackathon.
WaPOR tools database

Practical Information

– Event duration, from 9.00 on the 29th to 17.00 on the 30th of November
– Event location, kick-off at AUB in Beirut; and hack at AREC-AUB Farm (in Bekaa)
– Participation includes transport (between AUB Beirut and AREC), good food and 1-night accommodation at AREC-AUB Farm
– Find all the information you need about water productivity here and further information on the event here

Apply and Contact

Apply below before November 12, there is limited number of seats available.
Reach out to Simon Chevalking @ schevalking@metameta.nl / M +31 642089770

Prize

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