Tarapoto, Perú

Febrero 2015

Calling all technologists, mobile app developers and passionate civic-hackers: Join Digital Democracy, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University and Hivos on the trip of a lifetime. Journey to the cloud forest of Tarapoto, Peru. Collaborate with indigenous leaders from Ecuador and Peru to build tools to help them protect their territory and defend against environmental contamination. Help us build a mobile data collection app that can be used by grassroots activists around the globe to document environmental and human rights abuses.

What’s at stake? Across the Amazon, and rainforests around the globe, indigenous people face multiple threats, including oil contamination, pollution from mining, and deforestation. Dd is supporting local communities who are working to document and respond to oil contamination and environmental threats in the Peruvian & Ecuadorian Amazon. 

 
 

What? A Hackathon to build a mobile data collection app to support indigenous environmental monitors working to document oil contamination, illegal logging and more in the Amazon Rainforest

When? February 7-11, 2014.

Where? Tarapoto, Peru - a beautiful city of 100,000 in the cloud forest of northern Peru, 1 hour flight from Lima

Who? Environmental monitors from local indigenous communities in Peru and Ecuador, team members from Digital Democracy, and Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador), technologists from North and South America volunteering their time and expertise (like you!)

Why? Because we believe the best tools are built when talented technologists work directly with users to design tools they need. Because it will be the most fun you can have while doing good for people & the planet. Because Dd’s last Hackathon - in Haiti - was a blast. Because indigenous communities working at the frontlines to protect the Amazon rainforest deserve the best technical support to build tools that will help them win important victories, from cleaning up oil spills to protecting their land from deforestation.

How much does it cost? The cost is $1000 plus airfare per participant. Airfares to Lima, Peru from the USA are $700–$800 (East Coast) or $900–$1000 (West Coast) and flights to Tarapoto are $200–$240 return. A small number of scholarships will be available for participants from Latin America & underrepresented communities. Want to join us? See if your work will count the trip as volunteer time, and/or help support your travel!

For the past two years, Digital Democracy has been collaborating with indigenous groups in rainforest regions in Peru, Ecuador and Guyana to build robust tools to allow them to document, manage & share information about ongoing environmental challenges including oil contamination, land invasions, deforestation and more.

A key component of this work are mobile devices that monitors can take to the field to document what's happening in their areas. We've leveraged existing open source tools, but consistently found something lacking. Our goal with the Peru Hackathon is to build cross-platform tools (mobile, tablet, offline-web) for gathering an managing monitoring data from the field, which includes water sample results, photos, quantitative and qualitative data, observations and interviews. The tools need to work in an entirely offline environment.

The key challenges we are trying to address are:

1) UX: Improving the user experience for users who are smart, fast learners, but who have never used a phone/tablet/laptop before.

2) P2P Sync: Developing a way for 2-way offline peer-to-peer synchronization between devices in the field (e.g. between a phone and a tablet with a central data store) in the field, which can later be synchronized with the web. We have been looking at: CouchDB /PouchDB, using git / GitHub as a datastore, custom levelUp solution based on CouchDB, inspired by DAT.

3) Offline Media Workflows: Building offline workflows for photo and video data that needs to eventually reach a city up to 3 days away and upload using fast internet.

4) Managing Mapping Information: Improving the GIS capabilities of mobile data collection and focusing on integration with OpenStreetMap.