The Hackathon for Good community is growing and so do the opportunities it opens up for participants. The 4th edition in The Hague will have an exclusive Bonus prize provided by our partner Mothership Missions.

What is Mothership Coder Missions?

The ‘Mothership Coder Missions’ is a dedicated open innovation program created by Space4Good, WorldStartup and Ai Lab One. The Mothership community stands at the intersection of both environmental and digital landscapes. The missions have the goal of leveraging the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and satellite technologies in support of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, each Mission is paired to the direct landscape it impacts: urban, agriculture, snow, desert, ocean or forest.
Learn more about the Missions here.

“Choose your landscape, plant your flag.”

The Mothership team has chosen 3 out of the 9 challenges at the Hackathon for Good 4 The Hague. They are looking for solutions that not only solve the challenge but also address the spatial and vulnerability aspect of the landscape where the problem occurs. As such, a Mothership sub question will be included in the challenge briefs offering an opportunity to address these landscape vulnerabilities within the challenges.

Which challenges are eligible for the Mothership Missions bonus prize?

Water & Circular Greenhouse Economies: Biodiversity & water
Sub-question to tackle:How can remote sensing contribute to understanding the effects of greenhouse water to local biodiversity (water plants, insect populations) and surrounding environmental parameters (light, excess nutrients, plastic waste) that are key to preserving the ecosystem balance? Consider what SDGs this links to and the particular landscape vulnerability(s) your solution addresses.

Urban Flood Mitigation: Mitigation approaches
Sub-question to tackle: Nature based solutions
How can remote sensing and the “overview effect” serve as inspiration for creating more biomimicry/nature based solutions for flood mitigation in urban environments? Consider what SDGs this links to and the particular landscape vulnerability(s) your solution addresses.

Remote sensing for water salinity management
Sub-question to tackle: Ecosystem management
Can data mining or machine learning approaches be used to assess point measurements (from Rijkswaterstaat, https://waterinfo.rws.nl/#!/kaart/zouten/ ) as well as satellite images in order to understand the key drivers of salinization processes? Salt enters the Ijsselmeer at the Afsluitdijk, the IJ and noordzeekanaal (near Amsterdam), and from the polders. How do water management, weather, and waterlevels control distribution of salt across the lakes – what can we infer from the spatiotemporal data using data mining/ machine learning techniques?

What is the criteria to be applicable for the bonus prize?

During the first round of the Pitch event on the 28th of November, there will be one jury member present from the Mothership team at each of the 3 selected challenges.

The Mothership bonus prize will be awarded to the best team out of all participants from the 3 topics.
The main criteria to be applicable as a team are:

1. Indicate how your solution is addressing one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)
2. Link your solution to a certain spatial component that characterizes the landscape as vulnerable (i.e. urban, agriculture, snow, desert, ocean or forest) and show how your solution aims to mitigate this

What is the bonus prize offered by Mothership?

The Mothership Missions team is experienced in post-hackathon support and bringing early-stage concepts into real business cases.
The bonus workshop prize will be offered to the team with the most SDG- and vulnerable landscape-focused approach. The post-hackathon workshop will be provided by Space4Good, one of the Mothership co-founders.

A choice of 1 out of 2 signature Space4Good Workshops will be offered to the winners.

Land Use Classification

Advanced Remote Sensing
Duration: 1.5 hours
This course shares techniques for supervised and unsupervised classification of land cover. A mix of remote sensing and machine learning will be used.

Site Suitability Analysis

Advanced Geo-Information Systems
Duration: 1.5 hours
A powerful analytical training to evaluate which is the best place for something, i.e to build an airport. It takes several input parameters and weights them following a GIS-based methodology that will point at the highest rated place for his/her goal.

How to win this bonus prize?

To take a chance on winning this bonus prize, make sure you and your team focus on implementing a remote sensing solution which will tackle specific SDG’s. Make sure it is clear in the pitch you will give on Sunday the 28th.