The country’s first disaster hackathon happened this year – the Forewarn Disaster Hackathon 1.0, and as the chapter president of YouthMappers at Eastern University, I had the honor to be present from the promoting of the event as a partner chapter to being a competitor myself. The hackathon was focused on finding resilient solutions for the disaster affected people of my country.
This hackathon presented an incredible opportunity of learning and growth for me as I led our team – ‘Three Dot” - comprising of Dewan Monjur Elahi Choyon, Brazil Singh, Tausif Hasanath Siam, Fahim Ahmed, Md. Asaduzzaman Ashik and Rudra Dipta Pandit. Our idea – an app named Three Dot – was focused on revolutionizing the field of disaster management in Bangladesh.
At the initial stage of the competition “Create” - we proposed a one stop coordination platform for first responders of our country where they would find real time alerts, SMS alerts to provide important notification to the vulnerable people, providing critical insights after analyzing data from historical record, escape route to shelter, resource allocator, and real time analytics. We made a prototype of it with the key features. This was our preliminary idea. And then we were over the moon when we came to know that we had been selected as one of the top 15 teams of Bangladesh. The feeling was surreal, it gave us motivation and scope to integrate technology in the disaster field.
Then we began working on the feasibility of our idea, we were researching the current systems, had multiple informative and thought-provoking sessions with experts in the disaster field from organizations like Bangladesh Meteorological Department, Cyclone Preparedness Program, IWFM from BUET and HOT.
All these workshops were facilitated by the Forewarn BD. These sessions gave me an idea of the current disaster management system of my country and what were the loopholes present. After rigorous data analysis and talking with mentors, my team decided to focus our solution to one particular disaster – “Cyclones” – as it wrecks havocs in the country every year, and causes enormous damage. We took Patuakhali, Barguna as our targeted location for the prototype. Then we opted to add a shelter navigation system, which would give real time routing to the affected people during a cyclone, also it would show capacity, accessibility info to help make them choose the best possible shelter available to them. As it turns out, most of the fatalities happen, when people choose to go to a shelter, but find it filled with people, and then they have to go in search of other shelters, but by then the cyclone already hits. We wanted to better the system here and decrease fatalities. We also worked on adding a cyclone prediction system based on machine learning.
But then when the results were out for this stage “Check”, we are understandably disheartened, because we didn’t make it to the top 8. After some time, I also came to closure with this, the fact of not moving on to the next round just increased my hunger for making this project a reality. It made my resolution to work with this project to make it really effective to decrease the suffering of my community during disasters.
This had been an amazing ride, definitely there was bitterness of not making it to the top, but it helped me grow as a leader, teammate and a person. I had the opportunity to dabble on the usefulness of GIS and Machine learning and the responsibilities of a project manager and also network with other teams and mentors. It also helped me realize the importance of open data, why advocating for it is very much necessary in the current era of climate change. My team will take back this experience and work with the flaws to better prepare for the next hackathon or even the next disaster.
About the author
Mahjabin Binte Mannan is a fourth year Computer Science and Engineering Student and a chapter officer at YouthMappers, Eastern University, Bangladesh. Her role involves steering the chapter's efforts in leveraging mapping technologies and data science to address community challenges. Through this platform, Mahjabin is dedicated to promoting the integration of technology and disaster management, aiming for a positive influence on community.
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