World Bank to Organize Sanitation Hackathon Next Week in Lahore

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Emergence and rather the abundance of handheld devices, such as mobile phones and smartphones, have enabled the common man with all the computing power that was previously entitled to large organizations only.

This much hold of computing devices has best placed the common man to be able to support, maintain, operate or even control the administrative abilities and challenges that earlier required fully dedicated resources.

Organizations, across the world, are capitalizing the idea of consumer driven reporting – through smartphone apps or other similar means – to collect feedback about the services that they offer or to keep a close watch on end-to-end availability of the services.

In line with this approach and to achieve the digital solutions for maintaining Water and Sanitation services across the rural and urban areas of the country, World Bank is organizing a Hackathon in Lahore on 1st and 2nd December 2012 – where sanitation experts and technologists will gather to create ICT solutions to sanitation challenges.

In addition to Lahore, Sanitation Hackathon will simultaneously be taking place in Jakarta, Pune, Dhaka, Dar-es-Salaam, Helsinki, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Lima, and Cape Town.

Sanitation experts have worked with local communities to define some of the most pressing sanitation challenges in each of those cities. During the hackathon students, programmers, software engineers, data specialists and digital solution providers will team up to put their technical skills to work mashing up data, building on open source technology platforms and developing apps that respond to those challenges, which the sanitation sector can put to use on the ground to aid the communities that need them.

For example, home consumers in a particular district of Punjab are to be enabled with a mechanism to report the quality and quantity of water they get in their homes. Or if they didn’t get water on a particular day. Similarly, the officials of the concerned departments also want (two-way) communication with the consumers who submitted the feedback – to check the current status of Water or if their complaints (if any) were resolved or not.

Such (and various other) problem statements will be given to the technologies during the Hackathon, who will develop solutions on open source platforms to best achieve the resolutions.

These ICT based solutions, if found viable, will be implemented in countless metropolitans across the regions to enhance the Water and Sanitation services.

Event Details:

• Venue: Punjab Information Technology Board , Training Facility

  Arfa Software Technology Park,
  11th Floor, 346 – B,
  Ferozpur Road,
  Lahore,

• Timing:

  Saturday, December 1, 2012 at 7:00 AM
  Sunday, December 2, 2012 at 4:00 PM