Wednesday 12 February 2014

Continuing with the Hackathon

After defining the problems, causes and root causes thanks to the problem tree technique on Monday, the second day of the Hackathon started with forming the different teams. There are five in total including our team with SGT students. As a warm up, we introduced the spaghetti structure to raise the team spirit. Mashmallows were replaced by banana pieces. The teams then continued with different exercises such as creating a comic story to carry on with their project and business plan.

First pitching with the QuickRep group

In parallel, we tried to define what could be our focus for the project. Visiting the homes in Chamanculo and seeing the ditch was very eye-opening. We got the feeling that steps to be taken are huge and it is very difficult to know where to start from. Should we focus on the social aspect, technical aspect, economical aspect, and so forth. Everything is interconnected, the whole system is complex and changing the mindset of locals seems very challenging. We discussed around the idea of piloting a dry toilet or cleaning the ditch. This latter idea didn't seem afterall very long-term efficient as we noticed that people would throw their rubbish anyway after a while. The last cleaning day organized by ASSCODECHA happened last Autumn on a early saturday morning. Few people joined though everybody is concerned. Though this not the first impression you would get from the street, locals we met mentioned that here people do care for their family, but not necessarly for their neighbours. There is apparently no much sense of community in the city. In a smaller scale such as Chamanculo, it's a bit different. People know each other and children play altogether. Trust remains a big issue as well.

Children in Chamanculo

We came to a conclusion that the actual process of setting up any new system or even repairing an old system would be more interesting for us than the actual  technical details. How would the locals react, how can they participate in the design process, be involved in the construction and maybe maintenance ? How could this system could be implemented, how does the maintenance system work, what is the business plan around it and so forth. 

We need to present our ideas to the other groups tomorrow which will be the last day of our Hackathon. Though it might not be our final scope for the project, we would like to carry on with the dry toilet idea and propose a business model and guidelines for that. This will a possibility for us to get actual feedback directly from the locals and other partners. We would then also hear what are the different ideas the groups came up with. 

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