Member Article

App developers and Met Office tackle global challenges

The Met Office has hosted the lead event for the NASA International Space Apps Challenge.

International Space Apps Challenge is an initiative that is of the Open Government Partnership, which aims to showcase collaborative work on addressing challenges.

60 developers, including Met Office employees, came together to create, build and invent new solutions in order to address challenges from natural disaster planning to soil conditions.

Nick Skytland, programme manager for NASA Open Government Initiative opened the event, and commented: “It’s been great to be here collaborating with the Met Office and all of the supporting organisations.

“The Met Office truly represents the future of using Open Data and Open Source to drive initiative across government.”

Teams tackled problems such as #hazardmap, which looked at harnessing real-time information from social media during natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes; and #predictthesky, an app to predict when cloud conditions would enable you to watch astronomical phenomena such as meteor showes.

Two winning solutions were decided by a panel of judges from ShelterBox, Mubaloo, Plymouth University and the Met Office.

Winners included #growersnation; an app to determine what produce will grow given local soil characteristics and weather conditions, which stood out because of its humanitarian potential for third world countries, and the way in which the team crowd sourced information from other NASA challengers across the globe.

Elsewhere #welovedata was chosen as a device which would warn hay fever and asthma sufferers when the next day’s pollen count was expected to be high, and captured the judges imagination because of its potential to make data accessible and useful to millions of allergy sufferers.

The two winners will now be judged against other successful challenges globally, with overall champions announced in the next few weeks.

Sarah Weller, Marketing Manager at Mubaloo said: “We are thrilled to have been able to judge the Space Apps challenge at the Met Office.

“The challenge has really highlighted how much can be achieved in such a short space of time, especially with the use of crowdsourcing and open source data which proved vital to all of the teams involved.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .