Bringing #SpaceApps to the Magic City
The International Space Apps Challenge- two months ago this was just an idea on a conference call with the open.nasa.gov team. Now, here we are, mere days away from April 21 and 22, and everything has come together nicely. Beginning this logistical adventure seemed an extremely daunting task when I first began. But with the help of some fellow NASA Student Ambassadors and a few other NASA WaterSCAPES students, the Space App Challenge Miami event has come to fruition.
During the initial planning process and early recruitment we encountered a challenge with recruiting our primary source of potential participants, students from Florida International University. An early end to the semester this year has unfortunately caused finals week to be the week after the Space Apps Challenge weekend, causing many students to forgo their global participation to diligently study in preparation for final examinations. This left us a bit worried about participation in the Space Apps Challenge. But with the help of our open-source Café sponsor, Planet Linux Caffe, they introduced us to the local Miami tech groups, HackMiami and Drupal. These groups were really interested in the event and upon networking with them during their monthly “Hack” meetings we were able to make a contact with another one of our sponsors, Miami Shared. Miami Shared is a leading co-working community based in downtown Miami that aims to bring startup culture to south Florida by promoting and fostering entrepreneurship. This partnership with Miami Shared was critical. Registration numbers slowly started to climb.
Gov2.0 Radio has been extremely helpful in our recruiting of participants. They allowed us the opportunity to discuss our scientific background, our involvement with NASA and the Space Apps Challenge during our interview. Our local lead sponsor, CBIL360, a leading Miami-based web marketing company, also spoke about their partnership with the Space Apps Challenge and their commitment to keep the ideas alive after the excited of the event has dwindled. In the words of the CBIL360 CEO, “The event is two days, the problems are forever.”
Many other local companies and organizations also joined our team because of the innovation and creativity behind the Space Apps Challenge, but also those goals of global collaboration and government transparency outlined in the 55 nation Open Government Partnership. The Miami Science Museum is providing publicly available data collected from museum goers related to environmental perceptions and opinions. Mindful City partnered with the Space Apps Challenge because of the pursuit of “enlightenment” through global collaboration, idea exchange and the commitment to the environment and social needs that many of the Space Apps challenges seek to address.
The venue we have setup for the Space Apps Challenge is a comfortable working environment, the Panther Pit, at the Engineering Center at Florida International University. There is a lounge area, group tables with whiteboard accessibility, billiard table, foosball table, and ping pong table (what better distractions after hours of work). During the event we plan to have breakfast, lunch and snacks provided (tentative), while dinner on Saturday night will be self-served by a few of the local Miami food trucks. We will have a live video feed, via Ustream, intermittently throughout the event, during check-ins, talks and awards. Other locations will have the same capabilities, allowing Miami to check in on other sites around the world, and we already have plans to connect with Melbourne, Sydney, Jakarta, and San Francisco. Collaborative etherpads have been set up for the event to help facilitate the exchange of ideas between locations related to the teams particular challenge focus. Each challenge and location has their own pad and links to those pads can be found at Space Apps. Miami participants might even have the opportunity to team up with some of the virtual community. Final projects will be uploaded to the open-source repository, Github. Prizes from CBIL360,Miami Shared, and Github will be awarded to the top 3 projects. Final projects should not necessarily be fully functional, but should at least have some structure and function, a prototype. Two lucky team projects will also be entered into the global competition.
Participants should sign-in at the Panther Pit by 9am on Saturday morning, April 21. Teams will have the opportunity to stay and work overnight or go home and return Sunday morning. But we hope that you are so involved in your projects that you don’t want to go home. Throughout the event the judges will give short presentations related to remote sensing of Earth processes, planetary and astrophysics, agroecology, and Everglades hydrogeology. These talks will be accessible to anybody around the world using our live video chat via Ustream. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss ideas with the judges as well as other “subject matter” experts (the Miami organizing team) who are all NASA related personnel pursuing graduate level degrees in Environmental Engineering and Geological Sciences. Participating teams are more than welcome to choose their own particular challenge to work on; however, utilizing the background of our organizers and other “subject matter” experts the Space App challenges that would coincide with our expertise would be those related to remote sensing and the environment. Here is a short list of challenge ideas:
The planning of this event has given me the opportunity to interact and meet many different people with varying backgrounds locally and globally, but who are just as enthusiastic about global collaboration through STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) in addition to the innovation and creativity that will inevitably spark from the Space Apps Challenge. I am not much of a techie, but through the planning of this event I have become much more familiar with some excellent communicative and collaborative tools allowing the free flow of information and ideas across town and across the world. I am so excited (and anxious) to see the city of Miami (and all the locations) team up and work together with other concerned citizens around the world. These partnerships will foster innovative solutions to a myriad of global challenges from space exploration, environmental awareness, and social needs. The idea of people collaborating together-on one project- from all around the globe can help the world not only through innovation but may even contribute a little to world peace.
Figure 1. Some of the Space Apps Challenge Miami Team in front of the Space Environment Simulator at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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