Canada Fishackathon Winners Announced
Hundreds of young designers, developers, and subject matter experts from Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Halifax, and Vancouver joined thousands of participants in more than 35 international cities on February 10-11, 2018 to tackle endemic challenges facing our world’s oceans and fisheries, from environmental and human rights abuses to marketplace transparency and economic sustainability.
First organized by the Department of State in 2014, the 2018 Fishackathon was produced by the Toronto-based nonprofit organization HackerNest, and inspires the creation of digital solutions to address sustainable fisheries challenges.
Over the course of 28 hours, teams, many from universities (such as Seneca College, George Brown College, Ryerson University, York University, University of Waterloo, University of British Columbia, and Dalhousie University) and coding schools (like Lighthouse Labs and BrainStation) produced innovative projects which they ‘demoed’ for a panel of industry-expert judges. Fishackathon 2018’s Canadian winners are:
Stable Hacks of Toronto from Seneca College worked on a project that provides access to real-time marketplace data via Short Message Service (SMS) to expand fishermen’s access to different markets and buyers. Through the development of the Ship-to-Shore certification on the blockchain, the users will be able to certify that the trade was made at fair market value.
Vancouver’s Grow Fish team from the University of British Columbia developed an app that allows fish feed producers to assess trade-offs between alternative feed ingredients in regards to environmental indicators, total cost of the feed, and nutritional composition of the feed. These trade-off assessments are dependent on the farmers’ location, their target species, and their life stages.
Fish Food Science from Kitchener-Waterloo built an app to put "fish feed price analysis at your fingertips," and allow fish farmers to update their cost models in a fluctuating fish feed market.
Catching-Up, the winning team from Halifax, built a product that directly connects small-scale developing-world fishers to export markets to generate higher profits to fishers who need them most.
These four Canadian city winners will advance to the global finals, which will be judged by a panel of partners that include AWS, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Maverick1000 as well as venture capitalists and representatives of the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority of Ireland. The global prize includes scholarships to Founder Institute, $25,000 in credits and social media/blog promotion from AWS, as well as invaluable coaching and mentoring. Last year’s global winner, from Taiwan, developed an application to detect the presence of invasive species in Canada’s Great Lakes.
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Madina Turdieva 2/16/2018 |
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