The Dd team just finished a five-day event in the Peruvian Rainforest city of Tarapoto. Hack the Rainforest was an experience unlike any other - an unprecedented gathering of indigenous environmental monitors, technologists and civil society organizations to address urgent environmental problems threatening indigenous communities throughout the Amazon region.
A modification of the tech tradition of “hackathons” where technologists gather to produce something new over the course of a set period of time, Hack the Rainforest brought together 42 participants from 12 countries to collaborate on environmental monitoring projects run by communities from across the Western Amazon whose lands and resources have been ravaged by the impacts of oil drilling, mining and deforestation. Participants collaborated on two tracks to share best practices between environmental monitors from Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and to work on technical solutions to the challenges monitors face in gathering data in remote, off-line parts of the rainforest.
Dd is grateful to our partners and cohosts for making the event possible:FEDIQUEP (Indigenous Federation of the Quechua People of the Pastaza River), University de San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University and Hivos Foundation. Additional participants of the Hackathon included volunteer technologists from the US, Canada, Israel Peru and Chile, representatives from AIDESEP (the national indigenous organization of the Peruvian Rainforest) in partnership with EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency), Frente Defensa de Amazonia from Ecuador, Cuidadano Inteligente from Chile, LIDEMA from Bolivia, Veerduria Forestal in Peru, Hacks and Hackers Lima and Open Data Peru. The program built off of tools Dd has been developing over the past few years thanks to support from the Knight Foundation.
We'll be posting blogs and updates on the www.hacktherainforest.org, and you can check #HackTheRainforest or #HackeaLaSelva on Twitter and Instagram to see more from the past few days. You can also follow a Twitter list I created of the Hack The Rainforest participants.
Thank you again to all our partners, sponsors and collaborators, and most of all to each and every one of the 42 participants who traveled from all over the globe to work with us and our partners here in the rainforest. We are excited for what comes next as we work on these tools in the months to come!