GEO INDIGENOUS HACK4COVID
Action for Covid-19, Indigenous Empowerment, Collective Intelligence, EO data, ICTs
GEO Secretariat & GEO Indigenous Alliance
James Rattling Leaf Sr. (Rosebud Sioux Tribe), Titus Letaapo( Samburu Tribe), Mario Vargas Shakaim (Shuar),Claudinete Cole (Quilombola), Leo Cerda (Kichwa),Chief Almir Surui (Patei Surui People) & Claudinete Cola de Souza (Quilombola)
Join Indigenous communities in co-designing their own, culturally appropriate, ICT solutions to tackle COVID-19.
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is posing a grave threat to Indigenous Peoples livelihoods, health and wellbeing. Many communities do not have guaranteed access to health services and information and depend on outside supplies for sustenance due to food insecurity. Digital inclusion has never been more urgent and necessary. Many of the challenges that they are facing can be tackled using space assets. Join us in co-designing tools that include Indigenous people’s specific needs and priorities in addressing this pandemic.
We have organised a series of “Indigenous” hackathons in various Indigenous communities in Ecuador, Brasil, Kenya and the US with the intent of co-designing locally relevant EO-based challenges that are culturally appropriate to Indigenous beliefs and conceptions about diseases. The event will use a format successfully trialed by Space 4 Innovation during GEOHACK19, GEOSS/HACK 2018, and Arctic Citizen Science, hackathons by and for Indigenous Peoples that were co-designed with the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA, Geo science Australia, the National Computational Infrastructure, the Mobile Collective and the University of Alaska Southeast and the AIT.
The primary goals are to:
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Raise awareness of Indigenous People’s specific needs and priorities in tackling COVID-19;
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Enhance local capacity among indigenous communities to support local efforts towards building resilience;
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Promote the use of open EO data among indigenous communities;
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Maintain and strengthen Indigenous/local culture through the use of EO data and ICTs;
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Increase cross-cultural communication among local communities, scientists, health services, and data providers,
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Provide the GEO community (through the GEO Indigenous Alliance) with novel and innovative approaches to utilizing EO data to solve the current pandemic at a local scale
You can check out the challenges we have co-designed so far here.
If you would like to get involved as mentor, hacker or sponsor please get in touch ASAP! :)