February 22nd & 23rd, 2013 ★ San Francisco

ECO
HACK
SF Projects Program

Overview

Update:
Thank you to everyone who participated in EcoHackSF! Sign up here and we'll let you know when the next event is happening.

 We are passionate about understanding global environmental change, and don't see many events that bring together the diverse community of scientists, hackers, designers and hobbyists that share our interests. After three great events in New York, we brought EcoHack to San Francisco on February 22 and 23. Check out the photos:

What is EcoHack?

EcoHack is about using technology to improve and better understand our natural environment. Based on the hacking model of quick, clever solutions to problems, EcoHack is an opportunity to make a difference while having fun!

Past projects have included monitoring sewer overflow, building pollution sensors, cracking open an insect species database, mapping biodiversity, and routing bikes through New York City.

Who is this for?

If you're interested in the environment, technology, or both, EcoHack is for you! Do you have some interesting data to share? Are you a crack web developer, mapping expert, or data visualization guru? EcoHack brings together scientists, technologists, and environmental enthusiasts.


Program

FRIDAY 22 FEB. 6:30PM-9:30PM

5-minute ignite talks

Dinner starts at 6:30pm, and we'll get the talks underway at 7:15pm. Afterwards we'll head out for beers.

Check out the talks!

SATURDAY 23 FEB. 9:30AM-8:30PM

Hacking with data

This is an unconference, which means that on Saturday we will divide into small groups and actually work on solutions.

Bring your laptop, hardware, weather balloons, and data and be ready to hack.

We'll have bagels, etc. starting at 9:30am. Form your team, then get your hack on! At about 7pm we'll come back together to show off our what we worked on.

N.B. EcoHackSF is dedicated to a harassment-free conference experience for everyone. Our anti-harassment policy can be found here.

Location

For the first San Francisco edition of EcoHack, the generous folks at Climate Corporation will be hosting. Their office is at the corner of 3rd St. and Howard St, two blocks from Market St. They have a giant video globe!

Saturday the 23rd is also the day of the Chinese New Year parade. You should probably get off at Powell Station to avoid the crowds.

Be sure to bring ID.
Building security requires that you be registered to attend. There will not be any day-of registrations. If you did not register under your name, you will be turned away.

Alert: Critical Mass starts tonight at 6pm. Expect heavy traffic downtown.

Friday we will meet for pizza at 6:30PM with talks starting at 7:15PM. Afterwards, people generally go out for beers and get to know each other and talk about plans for their projects. Saturday we will start at 9:30AM and finish around 8:30PM - just in time for more beers nearby.

The Hacks

We had a great set of Ignite talks submitted this year and we've assembled the best of the best to present their ideas to you on Friday night.

Sponsor talks
Ross Solomon Climate.com APIs Slides

[more] Describing Climate.com APIs, including CLUs and historical weather back to 1950.
Eric Nguyen Google Earth Engine Slides

[more] Describing Cliamte.com APIs, including CLUs and historical weather back to 1950.
Jim Young The ESRI platform Slides

[more] Describing the ESRI platform.
Documenting environment
Kevin Koy Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine Slides

[more] During the 1920's and 30's Albert Everett Wieslander and his team at USGS compiled an amazing and comprehensive dataset known as the Wieslander Vegetation Mapping Project. The data collected includes landscape photos, species inventories, plot maps, and vegetation maps covering most of California. Several teams have been digitizing this valuable historic data over the last ten years, and much of it is now complete. We will be hosting all of the finalized data in our Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine.

Our task for the EcoHack community will be to develop a web/mobile application that will allow people to view and find the hundreds of now-geotagged landscape photos, and reshoot the same scene today. These before and after images will provide scientists and enthusiasts with an invaluable view of how these landscapes have changed over the last century. The non-geotagged photos can currently be viewed via the UC Berkeley Library. We will have api access to the geotagged photos available for the hackathon.
Rhett Butler Mapping deforestation news on Mongabay.com Slides

[more] Mongabay is an environmental science web site I developed in 1999. I'd like help developing a function that displays recent stories on a map based on the geographic coordinates set in the XML feed. Clicking on a story link would take the user to the story. I'd like to have a map for each topic-based XML feed (e.g. "rainforests", "oceans", "new guinea").
Energy and pollution
Gavin McCormick Greening electricity by doing things later Slides

[more] In many regions of the country, striking a big blow against climate change could be as simple as putting off doing your laundry. The key is timing: depending on the time and place, flipping a light switch may mean buying anything from dirty coal power to pristine wind. Of course, a normal light switch doesn't tell you which one you are buying! Yet for many regions, data on your current energy source are actually really easy to download in real time. It just usually wouldn't occur to even really die-hard environmentalists to look. In some regions, timing is the number one issue holding back the continued growth of renewable energy. Let's write a tiny app to grab these data and present them as a simple visual (perhaps a traffic light, maybe with a 24 hour forecast) for whether using energy in your area right now would damage the environment.
Gregor MacLennan Visualizing oil spills in the Amazon Rainforest Slides

[more] Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, several days travel from the nearest town, oil companies have been drilling for oil for the past four decades. Due to weak regulations and enforcement, the oil companies have cut corners and dumped toxic waste directly into the rivers. Now, with an aging infrastructure, there are oil spills every month. This is all indigenous land, and the Achuar people who live there still rely on the forest and rivers for hunting and fishing. They have been taking action to stop the contamination and get the place cleaned up.

The Achuar have set up their own monitoring system to document every spill. 15 young Achuar use GPSs and digital cameras to document every spill, past and present, and an Achuar coordinator gathers the data in spreadsheets and images on a laptop in the nearest town.

At EcoHack we will create a UI for entering data and getting it online. We will also creating powerful visualizations of existing data. This is part of a new project being led by Digital Democracy to bring tech solutions to these community run monitoring programs that have been active for several years.
Dave Ron Bay Area Community Solar Map Slides

[more] The Bay Area Community Solar Map (BACSM) will be an interactive, open-source online tool for users to explore community energy considerations.

Based on a coarse-grain, screening methodology-based geospatial platform, the BACSM will integrate and aggregate energy datasets for a clear and high-level comparative or constraints analysis. Users will be able to see how residential energy demand, grid capacity, and renewable energy (e.g. solar) potential interact to determine possible sites for community power projects.

As part of EcoHackSF, we will be building the preliminary interactive mapping application and associated geospatial web services with some base layer datasets for solar photovoltaic system potential. We will be working within a defined study area and with a predetermined selection process flowchart for locating suitable sites.

We will make sure to reach our basic functional and navigational objectives for the tool. It is expected that, at a later date, the geodatabase will be further populated and the tool’s stylistic features improved.

This is an exciting opportunity to build a dynamic tool that increases public awareness of, and dialogue on, the possibilities for community power!
David Holstius, Jill Teige BEACON: Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network Slides

[more] BEACON is a new approach to observing atmospheric gases over an urban area. Instead of using a small number of extremely sensitive instruments to measure ""representative"" concentrations for a large area, we blanket interesting locations with a high density (~2km) network of instruments. Individually, measurements from these nodes are of moderate quality, but when taken together can produce an accurate, highly resolved picture of real-time pollutant concentrations.

Currently, BEACON focuses on observing plumes of carbon dioxide (CO2), a major greenhouse gas. We're extending the network to measure other air pollutants (CO, NOx, and maybe PM) as well. We have hundreds of millions of raw datapoints on our server, and over the next year, we want to scale from a few dozen nodes in Alameda County to cover all of the Bay Area. This data will be incredibly useful for scientists, but we want it to be useful for citizens and stakeholders of all kinds.

If you're a mobile developer, mapper, interaction designer, or just want to dive into the data, we need you! We will work with you to generate ideas for interesting and informative dataflows, from sensor to citizen, scientist, student, or anyone else. If you want to talk infrastructure, we're happy to do that too. Bring your ideas and let's get hacking!
Food and agriculture
Nat Springer Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials Slides

[more] We are a team at UC Davis from the Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) and the Information Center for the Environment (ICE) and have brought together over 2000 sustainability indicators and dozens of global spatial datasets. We are currently developing an open-source graph database that relates these indicators and datasets to forty-four different sustainability issues (such as biodiversity, water, poverty, etc.). Our goal is to empower stakeholders in the agricultural industry such as farmers, policymakers, food production companies, and NGOs to find indicators and datasets for the sustainability issues they intend to address, and we would love to also include spatial visualizations of this data.

Our team at Davis is creating an online GIS interface that will show some specific layers on land use, poverty, and malnutrition, but we have a limited capacity to create open-source layers for the majority of our issues and indicators. We will have a number of these spatial datasets on hand including global population, crop yields, water consumption, farming systems, and protected areas. We welcome hacks that create unique visualizations of this data or any neat overlaps and comparisons of multiple datasets, all with the sustainable sourcing of agricultural materials in mind. Ultimately, we envision the crowdsourcing of open-source spatial layers to associate with these datasets, indicators and issues. We also have a few other hack ideas for those with a non-spatial bent as well, so don’t miss our ignite talk!
Brian Rashid Food'ficiency Project - Hungry for Data Slides

[more] According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 40% of food, worth $165 billion/year, goes uneaten (waste=energy). Food rescue organizations like Food Runners are partnering with donors like Whole Foods to utilize these goods that would otherwise be thrown away. However, no data tracking system is in place to assess the “fruits of their labor” for either the businesses donating goods nor the services distributing it.

I'd like to develop software that traces quantities of edible donated goods by categories such as produce, dairy and grains. The food is weighed/measured and the data is submitted by the Donor and/or Food Runners, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Data collected can be as specific as the amount donated per store location on a certain day, or as broad as the number of pounds distributed by all donors annually. This data then produces weekly, monthly and annual reports showcasing the quantified results of such partnerships.

Additionally, it would provide real-time planning information so rescue organizations and recipients are informed when donors input the amount and categories of food available for pick-up. The Food Rescue Organizations can plan their routes, dispatching accordingly, and recipient organizations can begin meal planning and volunteer organization.
Tools and apps
Karthik Ram rOpenSci - open tools for open science Slides

[more] Solving many of the basic and applied challenges in ecology and evolution requires access to large amounts of data, often spanning long spatial and temporal scales. These data are often heterogeneous and come from disparate sources such as field experiments, museum specimens, and sensor-derived data. In recent years many of these types of data have become programmatically available from institutional repositories. Leveraging these resources for new uses requires powerful tools that not only support discovery and analysis but also visualization and new synthesis. To fill this void, my colleagues and I founded a software collective called rOpenSci to facilitate this process. We have tons of projects that are hackathon friendly that people can easily pick up and work on in a day.
Stacie Riddle giveChange - An idea for changing the way we give Slides

[more] Ever been approached by enthusiastic eco-representatives on a busy sidewalk or possibly while exiting a Whole Foods? If so, were you struck by the irony of being asked to help “save a forest"" by writing sensitive financial information such as credit card details onto a triplicate form being held by a representative possessing no more authentication than a T-shirt with words like Greenpeace or Sierra Club printed on it? This project seeks to make grassroots efforts in tech-savvy cities such as SF more safe and efficient and to enhance these efforts by leveraging what so many already possess: smart phones with data connections. By simply scanning a 3D barcode with your phone’s camera, our mobile app will authenticate this individual, their organization, and their cause, and allow you to donate in the way that is appropriate for you and at a minimum, allow organization to gain more insight into its collection efforts.

This is an ambitious project. By the end of Saturday, the goal is to have a website and roadmap that clearly represent the project, a mobile app that can decode the barcode, and clear documentation for next steps and how the community can contribute to (and use) the project. Anything additional would be pure awesome!

Sponsors





If you or your company want to sponsor EcoHackSF, please write to contact@ecohacksf.org.

Partners


Team

History

EcoHack Images

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, or need a comment for a story in your newspaper or on your blog, please write to contact@ecohacksf.org