What an exciting week! Where to start? Usually I start from the beginning but I'll back track.
This picture is from devlids.com; an awesome project by Antonio Radovcic. Make sure to follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/niorad ; especially if you're a dev who wants to show of their lid. It's as simple as it sounds. Take a picture of your laptop covered with stickers, art, or alterations, and link your github or twitter account.
Instagram/Twitter post.
Now, about that hackathon. When I showed up for the pre-hackathon learning sessions the word hackathon didn't even register with me. I was preoccupied with other things, but on a whim stayed last minute for the entire hackathon.
June 29- July 1, 2018.
Be your ISP (internet service provider) with Althea Mesh - 8:30 am - 12:30pm
AlleyOop! A delay tolerant social network - 1:30pm - 4:30pm
The hackathon began at 5:30pm and lasted until 10:00am on Sunday, July 1st.
Originally my team was me and this guy I sat next to during the mesh networking learning sessions. Eventually we paired up with another guy who sat by us during the earlier sessions and someone else he found to work with.
Left to right: Juan Ramos, Jimmy Phoung, Crypto-Maven.
Julio Valdez & his drone
The hackathon wasn't a hard start at 5:30pm. We took time organizing and registering teams, then participated in some exercises lead by IBM.
IBM, UC-Berkley and other organizations were present; but IBM was the one with the strongest presence there. I was learning things on the spur of the moment, which was exciting. Probably the reason I stayed last minute, especially when I saw IBM shirts.
There was a moment in the hackathon that was the most important to me. During the hackathons people sleep on the floors or couches. In my case I pushed 4 chairs together and slept on them. This was my first 1.5hrs of sleep. I woke up in a puddle of drool that wiped off my eyeliner and I was so confused because I woke up to IBM's Watson talking! I didn't understand what was going on. I'm groggy and wiping spit from half of my face while IBM employees are working with Watson. I walk out to the main area where I walk into a presentation about robotics with some really cool footage. I didn't know what was going on and didn't even think that this could be my life... but IT WAS!!
Backstory: I'm in Puerto Rico for cryptocurrency and blockchain. Hopefully everyone should be aware that Puerto Rico was in the eye of the storm for Hurricane Maria (category 5) on Friday, September 22nd.
Two of our team members, Juan Ramos & Julio Valdez both were here for Hurricane Maria. Which is great for a hackathon where the central theme was : developing new and innovative ways of communication that may be deployed and used before, during and after any event that disables legacy telecommunication networks.
Presentation
Beneath the slides from the presentation we'll explain more about AdeptRelay App
AdeptRelay : Why this is impactful to continue working on + blockchain implementation (Steem)
Mesh networking via apps like firechat, bridgefy, alleyoop allows communities more control during the uncertainty of waiting out a natural disaster. Using bluetooth neighbors can send messages to each other. These messages are stored & forwarded. Which means, when a drone can fly out at the earliest time with a raspberry pi and hovers above a well known resource center (church) - the messages are able to be sent out to an area with unaffected networks.
Emoji language transcends language barriers (Spanish to English). Lorena can send a message with the emoji of a pregnant woman, and a helicopter. Signifying that she is pregnant and road travel is not an option. The best thing about the emojis are that compared to text, emojis do not stack data.
Communications drives data collections; which directly affects rapid action. This app allows people in the communities to connect together. Also, if they do not have the app when the drone arrives at the per-determined location they are able to download it.
The drones can be equipped with cameras. That can determine areas that are flooded and or blocked via landlside, tress or etc.. Data can be worked on by scientists from around the world, and they get paid in cryptocurrency. When data needs to reviewed or monitored government agencies are not known for being the most responsive. Professionals, students and citizen scientists would be the most ideal for helping with this.
The world-wide developer/science community can help kick start data management and visualization needed when a whole geographical area such Puerto Rico is out of commission so emergency and crisis response can begin promptly at the moment it is first safe. Local emergency agencies, volunteer search and rescue, incident response technology groups and the local developers of an affected area can trust the data, it’s managers and have minimal worries about the data they are using.
- The Jones Act is an archaic law regarding where Puerto Rico can receive aid during a natural disaster. Hint: only the U.S. Puerto Rico is closer to Dominican Republic, South American & Central American countries. Yet, they are locked into begging for special waivers of leniency from the U.S to get aid from other countries.
- When the US arrived, “More than 640 employees from other federal agencies temporarily left their jobs in the U.S. to support the Puerto Rico response.” A FEMA report released on March 16, 2018 on hurricane Maria shows that government is overwhelmed and that members from 80 federal agencies deployed to the island.
https://www.fema.gov/news-release/2018/03/16/six-months-after-maria-progress-made-work-continues
- Crowd funding the money from private enterprise – a cryptocurrency, especially in a decentralized hierarchy alleviates the issues of legacy hierarchies and perhaps highly nationalistic group think that unfortunately grossly stagnates and can not scale without a major disruption (blockchain).
Government agencies run off taxpayer money. When this comes to budgets for areas such as Puerto Rico, at some point the money becomes looked at as a finite resource because this is not an effectively sustainable & easily scalable source of monies.
This is despite the US government’s trillions in debt, systemic failures and Puerto Rico is on the bottom of it’s priority list. Funding for Puerto Rico has been frozen for years.
Money from the revenue model allows for the network to be repaired as needed.
IBM's Call for Code which is going on until August 31st, 2018 was the driving force behind this hackathon. On August 3-4th the IBM hackathon is slated to be held at Engine-4 in Bayamon, P.R. The code and ideas from this smaller hackathon are able to transfer over to the official IBM Call for Code event. We are serious about continuing with this idea.
The website (under construction): adeptrelay.app
P.S- Steemians who knew @adept , this project was named in his memory.
We are looking for sponsors! Primarily for getting the team members from the mainland (the states) to the hackathon. Also, giving us the ability to buy any equipment we may need to work with. --- or you could upvote and resteem this article!! Helping us use the money earned from this article for our needs!
Also looking for developers who would have the passion to help us- The IBM Call for Code site is here : https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/
E-mail me at - nicolevilla@coinsailor.com . Put in the headline AdeptRelay.
Thanks for reading, and make sure to come back for Week 4!