EcoMo 09
EcoMo09 – The Team
In September 2009, the Centre for Sustainable Communication sent David Kjelkerud, Jorge L. Zapico and Henrik Berggren (left to right) to the development camp EcoMo09. This is the story.
EcoMo09 – The Event
EcoMo09 was a 24h dev camp competition with an ecological theme, situated at BASH Studios in London. Participants were encouraged to come up with ideas that would benefit a greener world. The setup for the event was straightforward: A number of coders meet up to hack on projects and present their results after 24 hours.
In addition to intense coding the 24 hours were also consumed on other activities as well. The participating companies (Pachube, AMEE and Earth Open Source) held workshops on their APIs, and there were even a few Qigong sessions.
Even though the event was a framed as a competition it had a relaxed feeling, people chatting and exchanging ideas and suggestions. It was as much a social event as a competition.
Hacking at 3.a.m
EcoMo 09 – Carbon.to
Our contribution started with the idea that in our everyday life we are increasingly exposed to carbon dioxide information for our everyday life. From the grams CO2 the burger we ordered produced to the tons our travel created. The skill to understand this kind of information it is however under development and it is quite difficult to interprete, understand and relate to numeric carbon dioxide infomation. How much is 1kg of CO2? Is it a lot? Is it little? Our idea was to create a simple tool to transform carbon information between different units, trying to help understanding these numbers better, trying to improve our carbon literacy.
The result is carbon.to a web application that allows to:
- Transform carbon dioxide information to other units for example km of train.
- Compare different footprints for instance how many apples footprints equal a 4 hours flight
- Use as an API to transform CO2 information and present it in your own service in another unit. For instance: carbon.to/apples?co2=10 gives you back an XML with how many
EcoMo 09 – The projects
There were nine teams in total participating in the hack with different projects. The sizes of the teams varied from lone coders to well oiled groups of six people. The main platform was the web but one of the teams focused on mobile development on both iPhone and Android.
Three of the more interesting projects presented on the morning was free.near.me, Tom Parkers cross-modal transport calculator and Green map.
- Free.near.me: This project was developed by Alex Butcher, Nick Butcher, Jason Cale and Seb Nash. free.near.me is a web and mobile app that aggregates data from the biggest online freecycling communities. The idea behind freecycling is that people give away stuff they don’t use anymore to others. All of these things are usually first come first serve so to get the good stuff you have to be observant. But, with free.near.me you can subscribe to freecycling giveaways near your home or work and get automatic push notifications when new things happen. A very nifty thing!
- Cross-modal transport calculator: Tom parker built a helpful tool for people that want’s to travel more sustainable. In his simple web tool people can enter a trip between two locations and it show the possible ways to travel and how much co2 the different choices emit. Tom’s project was extra cool since he used our API to convert the co2 value emitted into bottles of beer.
- Green map: Last but not least was the guys behind the green map. The green map is a project which encourages people to create maps that show things that are green, this could be ecological stores and restaurants or other things related to the environment. What this team did was enable creators of these maps to make them accessible via iPhone and Android.
All nine projects that came out of the hack was impressive and we look forward to next years event.
