Data4Governance Hackathon — Team WaffiHub
Hackathon’s are more than just coming together, it’s an act of building together. Learning about the data4governance hackathon from a friend, we saw the need for forming a team here at the Warri Innovation Hub to participate at the hackathon to accelerate the utilization of data for good governance and improved service delivery, which its the focus of the hackathon.
A team comprises of two software developers, a designer, a mobile developer, a content creator, and a project manager, set out for Lagos on Sunday, 16th February 2020 by road to participate at the hackathon, which will be starting at 9 AM the next day.
By 8:40 AM, on Monday we were already at CC Hub setting up our laptop and devices to begin hacking solutions for any of the focus areas. After listening to various talks from the organizers and knowing about the focus areas for the hackathon; Education, Citizen Engagement, Health, Transportation, Agriculture, Urban Planning & Gas and the type of visualization they are looking out for, we did some brainstorming and picked on Gas as our focus area. The challenge was to provide six (6) suitable locations to set up a gas plant in the Niger Delta region.
Various data sets and resources were shared for the various focus area but there was none on Gas, we did some inquiring from the organizers they said they were having issues with the data sets and resources that we should try and use available data on the internet to visualize the 6 suitable location. That could have deterred us from that focus area to shift to something else but there’s the saying — “Nobody did it because everybody thought somebody would do it”.
We are very much passionate and focus on improving the lives of citizens in the Niger Delta region and the GAS area, its an opportunity for us to create an impact by visualizing data to improve the processing of gas. Statistics show that 40% of the gas flared in Africa is from the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, which results in air pollution and other health issues.
Since we had no Data analyst on our team, we bootstrapped among ourselves in gathering and analyzing various data from the internet and from the top of our heads. It was on the 2nd and 3rd day, some data on Gas were handed over to us by the organizers. We had no GIS analyst on our team, resulting in one of our software developers, volunteering its time to learn GIS and implementing the knowledge on our visualization.
We developed a mobile and web app to visualize the available data we had to find a suitable location for setting up a Gas plant. We used a model of outlining the problem statement, doing a suitability test, designing the mock-up and then build the actual visualization.
