November 05, 2012
Molly Norris reports from the first ever IDEO.org hackathon, where creative concepts sprung from the minds of over fifty people convened to fight poor sanitation neighborhood by neighborhood in Kumasi, Ghana.
On Friday of last week, over fifty minds convened in two locations here in the Bay Area designing concepts to turn the tide against open defecation at the community-level in Kumasi, Ghana. Our IDEO.org Co-Lead Jocelyn Wyatt led a getting smart on sanitation session in the morning (check our her presentation HERE), which was followed by a short opening brainstorm and then an in-depth three hour session to develop #crapmap concepts using the following framework: Collect, Understand, Act and Achieve. The resulting presentations showed a remarkable range of ideas with names like “Holy Sh*t!” and “Crapture.”
The scaffolding for our distributed brainstorm was presented alongside a design constraint that part of the system be deployed on an open-source digital platform.
The How Might We’s of our framework:
- Collect: How might we gather information about open defecation?
- Understand: How do we present open defecation in a way that drives action?
- Act: What action do people undertake against open defecation...
- In order to Achieve an open defecation free neighborhood reached through collective action.
We’re blending elements of all the concepts into several master concepts that will be turned into prototypes in our second build hackathon this Friday. However, for fun and motivation, we decided to crown a winner during this #crapmap hackathon with golden plungers. The runner up concept was “Top Toilet,” a plan to personify public toilets and give them online identities to improve their condition and make them a better competitor to open defecation. The winner was “Essien says…” — a concept named after the fake endorsement of the Ghanaian football star. It’s basically a texting service at public water points powered by Textizen (an open source text messaging platform for citizen feedback) with viral videos about how feces spread through a community dramatized with poo-covered footballs.
The bar for what it takes to win a golden plunger is set extremely high. Something tells me this week’s build hackathon might take it whole new levels of craptitude.
Are you a developer in the Bay Area? Want to get involved with this Friday's #hackathon? Sign up here.
Photos by John Won.
***This project is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this story are the responsibility of IDEO.org and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.