By: Jonathan Mather, Diego Barido, and Lucas Spangher
‘Whose Hacks? Our Hacks!’, Cleanweb Berkeley’s 5th annual Hackathon, roared to the stage on November 17th, 2017. As the organizers, we were excited to kickoff the competition and were proud of the results that we witnessed. With previous Hackathon winners having been in information technology for flexible demand and shared solar services, we wanted to challenge participants to take on lesser explored subjects at the intersection of data, energy and resources: environmental justice and the politics of climate change. The politics of climate change in the U.S. appear unsurmountable, and after a long and slow boil, environmental justice has now reached the status of a civil rights emergency. Clearly, these issues are relevant to the US and elsewhere; we were nervous to the extent our community would respond yet eagerly anticipated the new ideas that teams would bring to the stage.
As it turned out, our nervousness was unfounded: our community wholeheartedly responded to the call! In total, there were over 60 attendees and 12 teams from across the Bay Area, ranging from working professionals in professional energy networks to one young 16 year old high school student. Together, our participants helped to make this the largest Cleanweb Berkeley Hackathon to date. The submissions were excellent, including:
• Sway: A machine learning driven visual tool that can help concerned citizens, grass roots movements, or anyone, identify and pressure the most swayable congressional representatives – potentially turning them from climate deniers to a climate hawks.
• Megabites: A web platform that matches food donors and receivers (taking into account food restriction considerations), reducing food waste and promoting social equity.
• DACalytics: An open source mapping tool that incorporates data from NREL, Google’s Project Sunroof, the US Census and the US EPA to determine the prime areas (solar potential, economic benefit, and demand) in disadvantaged communities to invest in solar projects.
• JAMX: Mexico’s first tool for environmental justice, providing digitized data that previously existed only in images, aggregated and visualized data in interactive maps, and created three methods to enable community reporting (SMS, Twitter and Google forms).
• ClimateChase: A mobile/web game that introduces to the public relationships between unforeseen variables related to energy investment choices and how they affect climate.
Our winners were BERClean, a flexible demand app that depicts market prices and marginal emissions so that customers can reduce their costs and emissions; SolShare an application that connects people who want solar but don’t have real estate with people who have real estate but can’t afford solar; and the third place and people’s choice winner FoodPrint, a Chrome extension for Instacart that provides users with suggestions with food they could swap from their cart in order to reduce their environmental impact.
We were extremely impressed by the quality of everyone’s work, and look forward to encouraging and rewarding more projects related to environmental justice and the politics of climate change in future. We thank everyone for participating and look forward to seeing how many of these projects will undoubtedly flourish!