Today, Sujata Gamage made the main presentation at the memorial event in honor of Dr Sunil Gunaratne. Her presentation was based on more than 12 months of engagement with the ongoing effort to reform Sri Lanka’s electoral system. One of the key recommendations is for the development of an interface where political parties and interested parties could see how they would be affected by the various reform options. I was thinking we missed the opportunity of the Code 4 Good organized by Internews a few months back. But perhaps, it will still get done.
While the rest of the Sri Lanka slept peacefully, a considerable number of young and enthusiastic programmers gave up sleep this weekend – but for a good cause. Anyone dropping in to the WSO2 offices in Colombo the early hours of Saturday or Sunday morning would have been greeted by the sight of exhausted but determined coders hunched over laptops, tapping away. Among them were three teams working on a problem put forward by LIRNEasia. This was the scene of the Code4good hackathon which started on Friday evening (18th) and ran non stop until Sunday evening. Though the intense work happened this weekend, preparation began much before.
For the past week or so, LIRNEasia’s ICT for agriculture researchers have been interacting with three groups of coders who want to respond to our pitch described below. In Sri Lanka, a considerable amount of information relevant to farmers involved in the export sector is held within government departments and Ministries. How can we create a solution that enables farmers to receive important information vital to their work and also allow them to share information about disease outbreaks and other issues? Solution: Create an app that has information related to crop advise, the ability to take geo-tagged photographs and to upload to a platform for identifying and tracking diseases, and a platform where farmers can advertise to exporters. I understand there’s a lot of activity this weekend at the offices of WSO2 which have been volunteered for this Code4Good event.