No, we’re not talking about the worst Perch fillets you’ve ever seen. We’re talking about bringing talented people together across 15 cities around the world on a three-day coding marathon to support our global fisheries! The challenge is to use technology to help solve real world problems in fisheries management, conservation, aquaculture, and traceability.
Fishackathon is a public-private partnership that aims to capitalize on the expansion of mobile technology use across the developing world to address sustainable fishery challenges. The annual Fishackathon event calls on coders, designers, creatives, architects, product managers, project managers, oceanographers, fishers, ichthyologist, phycologist, algologist, and beach combers from all around the world to come together to create new applications and tools for use on mobile phones, devices, and other end-solutions, which can help fishers work smarter and more safely in sustainable fishing.
Working smarter and more safely toward a sustainable future is a worthwhile pursuit for any organization. But to set your target on our largest and most threatened ecosystem, which is utterly essential to life on this planet, might seem lofty if not impossible. The oceans are just too big, right? Consider all the effort and ingenuity we’ve invested into everything we’ve done off this planet like how many humans are in space right now looking back at this majestic blue (not green) marble we call home. Surely some of that novel inventiveness could make a huge impact on our oceans.
If this one weekend of sacrifice could lead to a better fishery for everyone how could anyone refuse? Fishing and camping might be my preferred way to spend my weekends, but I spend my weekdays working with technologies that have the ability to make these types of extraordinary leaps into the impossible, which is why I will be volunteering my time this weekend to help organize a fishackathon event here in Toronto, and perhaps why you should volunteer your time as well.
Be sure to follow FishingFury twitter and fishhackathon twitter on Twitter for live updates throughout the weekend!
