discussion / Wildlife Crime  / 19 October 2016

A recap on the DC Zoohackathon

Here I'm sharing a bit on the first ever Zoohackathon held in Washington, D.C. These are snippets from a report that I had written up. 

Participants: Approximately 18 individuals were at the DC Zoohackathon, ranging in age from 20’s to late 60’s. Participants included members of the private sector, academic community and government’s Presidential Innovation Fellows program. The participants were ethnically diverse, and largely male, with four of the participants being female. 

Speakers: 

The Friday opening speaker was Marshall Jones, previously affiliated with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Additional opening speakers included the Director of FONZ, Lynn Mento, Levi Novey, of the USFWS Division of International Conservation and Rob Vernon of the AZA. The Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department, Caryn R. McClelland, was also a speaker. Saturday’s lunch involved a panel discussion with Nancy Gelman, who was working with USFWS MENTOR-POP fellows and representatives of the Natural Resource Conservation Network and the EAGLE Network. 

Judges:

The judges included author Sharon Guynup who writes about tigers, Michael Brown-Palsgrove, Curator of Asia Trail and Giant Pandas, Sherry Sykes of the State Department Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and Steve Olson  of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.

Location:

The Zoohackathon was held at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The opening and closing/judging of the event was held in the auditorium at the Visitors Center. The hackathon during the day was spent at the Amazonia exhibit near the GIS lab. The public were free to walk through the exhibits and interact with the coders. The weather outside was rainy on Saturday, limiting the amount of people at the zoo. Saturday night and Sunday morning were spent at the General Services Building,

Zoohackathon coding projects:

The coders came up with some interesting ideas through reading the problem statements. Those that submitted to Devpost are hyperlinked. There were two ideas which di not entirely meet the criteria for the problem statements, although all ideas to stop wildlife crime should be reviewed and considered for their merits.  One was looking at using fake wildlife products to disrupt trade, specifically fake rhino horn and one of the other participants talked about using cloud computing to stop wildlife trafficking.

The winner was WildFace, a new way to combat wildlife crime using a smartwatch. There were two honorable mention winners. One was Wildlife Friendly Traveler, which seeks to inform travelers about buying wildlife products when traveling, with an emphasis on cruise lines. The other honorable mention was Conservationville, a microfinance conservation tool to engage donors for conservation. The other submissions included a Chatbot called PoPo Pango to monitor wildlife trafficking markets and sales. Another submission is called Exclamation which uses a Whatsapp based app to allow for wildlife crime enforcers to get additional help in an emergency, like a panic button.

 

This was a great event and I hope that all of these great initiatives can move forward!




Thanks for the report. Looks very interesting. Do you have plans to continue with new hackathons? And if so what lessons do you take from the first one?

Hi Theun, 

We certainly do have plans for more hackathons (and potentially zoohackathons) coming up this year! We can't wait to share these plans with you very soon.

Our meetups and events group is the best placeo find out about local hacks and gatherings. @btmartinez just shared a hackathon you might be interested in (if you happen to be one of our washington DC members),

Do you plan on being in Washington, D.C. over Earth Day weekend? Join Conservation X Labs and teams of hackers, coders, makers, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, creative thinkers and tinkerers to celebrate Earth Day weekend 2017 by creating solutions to challenging conservation problems in front of a global audience. Multidisciplinary teams will compete in an on-site event called Make for the Planet over three days of the Smithsonian's Earth Optimism Summit in Washington, D.C. (April 21-23, 2017). Equipment will be available to create prototypes and models of hardware and/or software solutions to specific conservation problems. 

If you're keen to participate, you can discover more info and call for team mates over at Barabara's thread here

As for your question about lessons learnt - did you have some specific aspects of hosting a hack you'd like feedback on? Are you thinking of hosting one yourself? 

It would be interesting to hear from hosts like @Sophie+Maxwell and @Alasdair who did a tremendous job leading the ZSL hackathon or @demark from an organiser's perspective. Or even some of the participants like @zbaynhamherd ?

I'm also interested to hear from others who have been involved or hosted hackathons- @mygshah and @efegraus we've spoken about hackathons in the past, perhaps you might have perspectives to share? 

Cheers, 

Steph