Random Hacks of Kindness Pretoria

• by skullkey
• December 5, 2011

What an awesome event, can’t wait for next time! Our team’s solution (H2flow) took first prize and I hope our solution makes the impact it was intended.  Briefly the weekend:

Three challenges were posed at RHOK Pretoria this weekend:

• Water metering reading in Sierra Leone and community based water management in Eastern Cape – a low cost mobile solution is required
• Donor management by local children homes and charities who depend on donations for their sustainability
• Crowdsourcing early warnings for pending social disasters – using the data streams from social media to identify clusters of sentiments that could leading indicators for brooding disasters

Starting at 9 on Saturday, these were presented to the group and we split into teams – four teams were formed – two teams tackled the donor management (different visions about the solutions).

Representing House4Hack, I participated in the water meter reading and water management challenge.  Our team started as three (Schalk, Klaas and Jabu) and as the weekend wore on were assisted by Vuyo and Madeleine.   These are extremely talented people with Klaas an entrepreneur in the mobile space (Bamboo) and both Jabu and Madeleine PhD students working at SAP research !

Technology wise we tackled the problem using:

• Android for mobile reporting and problem reporting – Klaas and Jabu respectively
• Couchdb for back-end and web2py for reporting and management – Schalk

Sunday morning saw me phoning HC to get some advice on web2py – thanks HC, made a huge difference!

Unfortunately Klaas could not attend Sunday and we ended up only presenting the water management solution at 15:30, the judges selected this as the best solution for the weekend!

Thanks for Jossekin and friends at SAP Research for organising this great initiative and SAP Research for sponsoring the venue, food and prizes.

 

 

What an awesome event, can’t wait for next time! Our team’s solution (H2flow) took first prize and I hope our solution makes the impact it was intended.  Briefly the weekend: Three challenges were posed at RHOK Pretoria this weekend: Water metering reading in Sierra Leone and community based water management in Eastern Cape – a…