Green Hackathon Hacking for Sustainable Food Jorge Luis Zapico KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, Stockholm, Sweden Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden zapico@kth.se !! Abstract— The ICT4S Green Hackathon was an event ! also a de-facto focus on developing, meaning that the results exploring the use of information and communications cannot be only a neat idea in a powerpoint, and code and technologies in sustainable food production and consumption, working prototypes are more highly valued. This is part of the where developers, designer and problem owners met for creating aforementioned hands-on approach which is central in the prototypes and applications for a whole day. This article presents hacker ethic [3]. the concept, implementation, results and lessons learned from this event. During the ICT4S 2014 conference, a Green Hackathon was organised as a workshop activity the 23rd of August, Keywords— hackathon, food, sustainability, sustainable HCI. located at R1, a dismantled experimental nuclear reactor underground at KTH in Stockholm. This time the event was I. INTRODUCTION focused on sustainable food production and consumption, and A hackathon is a portmanteau of “hack” and “marathon”, organised by the Centre for Sustainable Communications at an event to hack for an extended amount of time. In these KTH, as part of the project From Data to Sustainable Practices, events, enthusiasts meet and work with software and/or in collaboration with COOP Sweden and supported by OKFN hardware projects for a limited but long period of time, e.g. 24 Sweden & Open Sustainability WG [11]. hours without rest. The reference to “hack” is not to hacking as in computer crime [1], but to the hacker ethic [2], which defines a hacker as someone who "programs enthusiastically", who believes that computing and information sharing is a positive good and who believes it is an ethical duty to facilitate access to computers and computing resources [3,4,5]. These events have gained popularity in later years and many hackathons are organised both by companies and other organisations. Some are focused around a technology or application (like Facebook [6] or Linux [7]), while other events focus around a specific problem area or topic (like Random hacks of kindness [8] or Hack for Sweden [9]). A key idea of these events is a hands-on approach, focusing on producing workable functionality, prototypes or applications at the end of the event. Many times there can be a competition component, where the results are presented at the end of the event, winners are selected and prizes may be distributed. The focus of the event in the prizes and competition can vary between different hackathons, in some the prizes the main driving force while in Fig 1.Picture of the Green Hackathon others the competition is only symbolic. This text documents the concepts and ideas behind this Green Hackathon is a series of hackathons that started in Green Hackathon and its results, and it will present and discuss Stockholm in 2011 focusing on using information and some of the lessons learned from the event. communication technologies (ICT) with a sustainability purpose [10]. After the first event in 2011 there has been a II. FOOD, SUSTAINABILITY & ICT number of Green Hackathons and associated events organised The focus of this hackathon on food was due to several in different cities, e.g. in London, Helsinki, Berlin, Athens, reasons, but the main motivation was that while food Zürich, Fukushima, and a coming one in Tokyo. These events production and consumption is one of our main environmental have been sometimes organised with help of the original impacts, in previous Green Hackathon the focus has been organisers and other times independently by local groups, but mostly in energy (electricity, transportation, etc), while food the events shared the common concept umbrella, graphic has been for the most part neglected. profile and name. The main restrictions of a Green Hackathon is that the results created need to focus on sustainability, and Food production and consumption have become a major for the most part involving some kind of ICT solution. There is driver behind environmental degradation, such as climate The Green Hackathon was financed by the Vinnova Excellence Centre for Sustainable Communications, with support from COOP Sweden. change, biodiversity loss and degradation of land and • Software tools, such as a website, mobile application, freshwater. According to Foley et al [12] agriculture must be visualisation, etc. transformed to be sustainable and must deliver sufficient amounts of food for the growing population (both through • Hardware applications, such as Arduino based electronics. increased efficiency and dietary changes) and also cut • Tangible design prototypes, that demonstrated a use of greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80%; counteract technology in a physical context. biodiversity loss; reduce water use and phase out pollution from agricultural chemicals. • Stories and new knowledge, gained from the collection and visualisation of data (data journalism). The research area of ICT4S and sustainable HCI has focused mostly on electricity and energy, but there is a growing The event was a one-day activity, starting in the morning interest in the area of sustainable food [13,14]. For instance, with a keynote and the presentation of the event. Afterwards researchers have been looking at the possibilities of increasing there was an exercise for networking, where the participants sustainability by using technology to help changing users food did a round of “speed-dating”, introducing themselves and behaviour, wanting to close the intention-behavior gap existing discussing possible ideas. Then the participants could pitch between the attitudes and values around sustainable food hack ideas and based on these pitches they grouped themselves consumption and the actual consumption practices [15]. into different teams. This hackathon was different than Examples of efforts include using technology for visualising previous ones in that most of the participants had not a clear the carbon footprint of food [16] and food-miles [17]. An idea of what to develop nor were part of an existing group, so especially interesting topic of research is the reduction of food the networking process was very active. The hackathon had 23 waste in households, as it is estimated that around one third of participants, 5 women and 18 men, from diverse (mostly food produced is thrown away [18]. ICT has been used as a european) countries. Roughly around half of the participants way of making this waste visible. Ganglbauer et al [19] created were part of the ICT4S conference and working as researchers, an intervention where a camera was installed in the fridge in while the rest were coming mostly from the local community different households to record food use and stimulate of designers and developers. reflection. Thieme et al [20] present a study on an augmented waste bin that takes pictures of the waste disposed and upload them to an application to motivate reflection on the users waste practices. Farr-Wharton et al [21] present a prototype that aims to reduce food waste by increasing the knowledge and awareness of the existing food stock at home. III. THE HACKATHON Based on this background and existing applications, the idea of this hackathon was to explore new ways of using ICT to mitigate the problems and find new solutions. The hackathon had two main rules for the results: • To use information and communication technologies. • In the topic of food and sustainability. Some more concrete topics were provided as inspiration: • Using technologies for helping farmers with organic Fig 2. Team working during the hackathon. growing practices. • Promote more sustainable food practices (organic, local, After the groups were formed, they moved to the sitting seasonal, vegetable-based..) areas to keep developing the ideas and start working in practice. The “hacking” time was around eight hours. This time • Communication of added value of organic food, creating was shorter than in previous hackathons, for instance the connection between food producers and consumers. original Green Hackathon ran for 24hours. • Use of new technologies for interventions at After the hack time was over, the groups presented the supermarkets promoting more sustainable food practices. results to the public. There were five projects that finished the • Reduce food waste (both at homes and in supermarkets hackathon. The jury that decided the winners was formed by: and supply chain) • Louise König, Sustainability Manager at The Co- • Calculating and communicating environmental impacts operative Group Sweden, COOP of food products. • Marko Turpeinen , Director, EIT ICT Labs Finland A main value of a hackathon is the focus on developing, and in • Patricia Lago, Associate professor in software, most cases in coding. In this hackathon we wanted to broaden services and sustanability, VU University Amsterdam participation and have also space for more design prototypes, without losing the focus on creating prototypes and going • Maja Brisvall. Manager, Stockholm Resilience Centre beyond discussing ideas. Four types of results were suggested: IV. THE RESULTS The prototype was created by: Sotiris Salloumis, Gaye There were five final projects that were presented in the Georgia, Johan Zetterquist, Jacky Bourgeois, Sophie Uesson, John Chang. Hackathon: C. Urban Fruit Initiative App A. Eat Exchange A web interface for urban fruit initiative, an existing project The first winner was Eat Exchange, a mobile application which connects homeowners with apple trees with pickers which allows a local community to share food that would have willing to pick apples, and produces apple juice which then been wasted. The application idea is to enable individuals to gets distributed between the different stakeholders. advertise the food that they wouldn’t be able to consume. Then the supply of spare food would be collected by the members of the community who would otherwise need to buy it. Fig 5. Screenshot of Urban Fruit Initiative. Fig 3. Screenshot of Eat Exchange. The prototype provides an easier way to register and broker the connection between the two groups, allowing the The prototype was a combination of mobile app mockup registration of new tree owners and fruit pickers and providing and a live test using jQuery, HTML and CSS. Created by: a map interface. Christopher Weeks,Daniel Schien, Pernilla Hagbert, Friedrich Chasin, Ole Schultz, Tipa Stefan,Theodorou Sophy- Emmanouela. B. Last Minute Food The second winner is a prototype application that proposes gathering information from COOP supermarkets about the food that is about to expire and allows the users to explore recipes based on those ingredients and facilitates the purchase in the store. Fig 6. Screenshot of the map interface. The prototype is open source and made using Firebase, Bootstrap, jQuery and Google Maps API. Made by: Richard Blume, Mrhetab Kidane, Andrew Kobylin. D. Cosecha Made by the author and outside of competition, Cosecha is a planning tool to calculate the amount of different crops to grow in a given field connected to yield and revenue. The idea is to be able to calculate the need for seed purchases (row- Fig 4. Screenshot of Last Minute Food. meter) based on production goals (kilograms of produce and earning) The mockup mobile application presented different functionality, including a way to navigate the store using voice. The prototype was made using jQuery and HTML by: Jorge Exchange explored how mobile technology could connect the Zapico local community to share resources that would otherwise be wasted; Last Minute Food explored how supermarkets could market food that is close to expiration data and in risk of being thrown away; Urban Fruit Initiative looked at how IT can empower local initiative that connect people with extra fruit with pickers so the fruit does not go to waste. This focus in food waste is in line with the existing projects in the sustainable HCI community presented before, and maybe a natural low-hanging fruit for increasing sustainability of the food system. One intention when planning this event was to broaden participation to better include skills outside programming and developing [10]. This was successful as the event attracted a broad range of participants, and the teams had mostly a balance between technical competence and design competence. There was many of interesting conversations and brainstorming and good team dynamics. Fig 7. Screenshot of Cosecha. ! E. Eat Seasonably A web prototype application which try to tackle the the gap in consumer awareness by recommending recipes based on seasonality. Fig 9. A team discussing during the event. On the other hand, the results were all mobile applications or website, which has been the standard also in the rest of the Fig 8. Screenshot of SSH team. previous hackathons. In this hackathon we tried to explicitly open up for other contributions such as data journalism, Made by: Sevag Balkorkian, Samuel Chinenyeze, Haftom tangible design prototypes and hardware-based hacks. It can be Tesfay argued that only “allowing” these type of contributions is not enough. Web and mobile prototypes are easier to work at a V. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION hackathon scale, as there are many off-the-shelve solutions to facilitate development, allowing faster creation of working The ICT4S Green Hackathon explored the use of ICT for prototypes. For promoting other type of results such as physical sustainable food consumption and production. Participants design prototypes or hardware tests, a more proactive approach spent eight hours developing prototypes and bringing ideas should be taken, facilitating workshop materials and forward into more concrete form. This short deadline with a components from the organisation side, to provide affordances limited, but uninterrupted, amount of time is instrumental in and but also to inspire. the productivity of the hackathons. The quality of the prototypes produced in hackathons can be considered quite The use of ICT for promoting sustainability in food high for this short amount of time, as the results above show, production and consumption can be an interesting topic for even in this event where the time was much shorter than in research for ICT4S. This topic has not been as widely explored previous hackathons. as other areas such as electricity and energy consumption. Hackathons events can be a good way of generating and testing A main theme that emerged from the hackathon was food ideas, as it can be seen from the presented event, creating waste. In the keynote it was mentioned that a third or more of prototypes as proof of concepts that could be developed further the food produced worldwide ends up as waste [18], this as applications or in research projects after the hackathons. challenge was taken up by the participants and three of the five contributions focused on how to reduce food waste. Eat ! 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