1. Introduction

Open Earth Observation and open geo-spatial Information are critical technologies to supporting and achieving the 2030 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda, including SDG2 on ‘Zero Hunger’. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Capacity Development in Agriculture Data Working Group (WG) aims to develop synergies between science, education and training, and development practice. This includes sharing knowledge (ideas) on training initiatives and technologies, and reducing digital divide to ensure that researchers and practitioners from developing countries can also benefit from the practices evolving from developed countries. The Kampala INSPIRE ideathon and hackathon is a good example of capacity development in agriculture data.

Hackathons are an excellent opportunity for bringing together people from different work environments, culture and disciplinary backgrounds (Figures 4, 5 and 6), forming teams around a problem or idea, learning from peers and teams, and collaboratively co-creating unique solutions to address modern challenges cannot be addressed better. Traditionally organised as on-site events, with teams working on different challenges judged on predetermined parameters, hackathon events are considered more productive than their virtual counterparts. However, they are also expensive to run, host and participate in, which can exclude many potential participants. Virtual hackathons are therefore preferred as a good way of promoting inclusiveness and digital participative collaboration; to share knowledge, enhance learning, and to implement emerging practices.

The goal of the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020 was to build on and strengthen the existing partnerships between several EU projects and African communities.

2. Background of INSPIRE Hackathons and Ideathons

The word hackathon was created by a combination of the words “hack” and “marathon” and traditionally hackathons are organized as on-site events with different groups working on different challenges that are judged on diverse pre-agreed parameters (Kollwitz & Dinter 2019). The concept of the INSPIRE hackathon differs from traditional hackathons in that it is not just a multi-day event, but it is a continuous process designed to effectively use results from previous hackathons. This means that challenges are defined to build on the results of previous hackathons with the aim of enriching the previous innovation actions. INSPIRE hackathons last for several months as virtual events.

The full virtual INSPIRE Hackathons provide an excellent opportunity for bringing together people from different work, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds (Figures 4, 5 and 6). Teams are formed around predefined challenges to explore and apply scientific achievements, share knowledge, develop capacity and collaboratively evolve answers to the predefined challenges. The outputs from the INSPIRE Hackathons generally take shape as: websites, webinars, applications, tools, policy papers, or processes.

The first INSPIRE hackathon was organized as part of the INSPIRE conference in Barcelona 2016 (Charvat et al. 2018). The INSPIRE hackathon concept therefore evolved as a means of supporting sustainability and implementation of results of the European Commission Research Framework Program FP7 and H2020 (Bye et al. 2018a), (Bye et al. 2017). The initial idea mainly focused on the sustainability of Open Land Use datasets, Smart Point of Interest, and Open Transport Map¹ coming from SDI4Apps,² Open Transport Net³ and FOODIE⁴ projects. In cooperation with citizens observatories projects CITI-SENSE,⁵ CobWeb,⁶ Ground Truth 2.0,⁷ LandSense,⁸ the concept of combination Voluntary Geographic Data Initiatives was built (Harris et al. 2013), (Charvat et al. 2011), (Charvat et al. 2013) and citizens observatories (Higgins et al. 2016). This brought together different project communities to facilitate transfer of technology, and knowledge, between the projects, and eventually to organizations, and companies. Acknowledging that sustainability of communities is pivotal to these transfers, the idea of a series of hackathons became part of the INSPIRE hackathon concept right from the start; nourishing, and gradually building a multi actor and multi disciplinary community that embraces non-formal learning dimensions. The INSPIRE hackathon is therefore not an event, but a process. An important component of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) directive is to make data, and information, interoperable, which is the central point of the INSPIRE ethos, and ‘inspired’ the INSPIRE hackathon concept (SCAR 2019). Although the 2016 hackathon was all on-site, bringing problem solving and idea development together, the combination of online and on-site activities were simultaneously implemented. As the community expanded both within Europe and beyond, the need for remote working as an addition to in-person events became apparent. It is for this reason that the Plan4all association decided to organize virtual INSPIRE hackathons which started in 2017.

Over fifteen INSPIRE Hackathons have been organized since 2016 by the Plan4All association.⁹ The network of supporters, co-organisers, and active participants has steadily grown. Open data and open source, interoperability, support for Copernicus, INSPIRE and Group on Earth Observation) GEO remain the common themes of the virtual events, in spite of variations in expertise, perspectives, and technical abilities which change with the times and global trends. The Hackathons themselves spark many interesting ideas, with results from one event often forming the basis for changes in the next hackathon fashioning. INSPIRE events are open to everyone interested in participating and serve as a platform for international expert collaboration, training, and capacity building (Bye et al. 2018b).

3. Methodology for the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon

The goal of the 2020 Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon was to continue building and strengthening existing partnership between various EU projects and African communities that began with the 2019 in the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon (Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019). The Nairobi INSPIRE hackathon attracted more than 200 participants representing 26 African countries. It concluded with an explicit demand for a follow-up in the Kampala INSPIRE hackathon, where African mentors, supporters, and participants were included.

The methodology of the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon was built on the general INSPIRE hackathon concept (Figure 1). Normally the online/virtual hackathon ends with a concluding event and presentation ceremony. The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon ended as part of the IST-Africa conference in Africa. The incidence of COVID-19 global epidemic, unfortunately precipitated the Kampala INSPIRE hackathon resulting in the event being organised for the first time as a fully virtual event (Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020).

The Kampala INSPIRE hackathon started in March 2020 and concluded with an online event on Wednesday 6 May, 2020, bringing together over 200 participants from over 40 countries (Figure 4). Participants represented 42 countries world wide: Africa 20 countries (77% of registrants), Europe 12 countries (12% of registrants) and 11 other countries (11% of registrants) Multidisciplinary teams (Figures 5 and 6) were formed, addressing a total of 10 challenges. The themes covered included agriculture, food security, desert locust, citizen science, climate change, and ethics.

4. A Concrete Example: The Desert Locust Environmental Challenge

The hackathon team’s work flows in 4 phases: 1) Prepare, 2) Ideate and build, 3) Test and learn, and 4) Finalize. The full report in (Cherenet et al. 2020).

1. Prepare: The predefined challenge statement gives the direction to the team’s work. The Desert Locust teams’ purpose is to find solutions and emerging practices on the challenge that is defined as follows: “Parts of Eastern Africa are experiencing locust infestation since the end of 2019. It has posed a great threat to the East African Societies, with locust swarms comprising billions of locusts that damage crops and pasture. Without timely or effective interventions, sporadic cases of desert locusts can easily turn into an upsurge and ultimately a plague.” (Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020). The preparation phase includes the team forming procedures, setting up the communication channels and defining roles and responsibilities of team members.

2. Ideate and build: In this phase, the team briefs on the challenge they seek to address, observes and analyzes the current state, explores available technology solutions, picks up the best option, and eventually builds the solution that responds to the challenge. As the team members learn from each other, share knowledge, build capacity by exploring research results and novel technologies, they also learn how to co-create and ideate novel breakthrough solutions.

The team further develops a geospatial base risk outbreak model for the timely prediction of desert locust invasions. This solution applies Earth Observation data and machine learning methods for identifying areas most affected by locust invasion. The mapping tool covers Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Iran and Pakistan (Figure 3).

Building the mapping tool the main tasks are data collection, data pre-processing and performing analysis using machine learning methods. The objective of this hackathon was to develop a structured workflow, entirely automatized that could be used by anybody to analyze the evolution of vegetation in specific regions that could be impacted by desert locust swarms. As the team was made of experts coming from different fields, there was a desire to build a product that could be easily understood yet also include technical innovations. The team consisted of participants with technical background in remote sensing, spatial data analysis, and machine learning, as well with a background in natural science. With this team composition, ideas were evolved in various ways ending up with the most comprehensive response to address the desert locust crisis. The composition of the team allowed extensive exchange of knowledge and opened new horizons and ideas on how to identify the complexity of the desert locust crisis in Africa.

3. Lessons learned: The post-test reflection of results of the entire work brought forward new ideas e.g. the possibility to automate, and by modifying some specific parameters that are identified as a bias in the training, improve the output.

Throughout the entire hackathon, the Desert Locust team kept learning and developing new skills and know-how about data set preparation, machine learning methods, Big Data management, handling and information retrieval, skills on virtual communication and accessing open databases, all of which are useful for accomplishing the challenge.

While geospatial solutions have great potential for transforming agriculture in Africa, it was evident that the realisation of the benefits of GIS (Geographic Information System) in Africa is still distant due to the challenges of data quality and availability of softwares, user application and knowledge, and the relatively low resolution of the currently accessible open-source geospatial data. Moreover, in Africa, geospatial data in many government institutions are available in analogue format rather than digital, hence making key challenges over the use of these technologies at the required quality and pace.

4. Lessons Learned

The INSPIRE hackathons, Nairobi (2019) and Kampala (2020), provided a research framework for hackathon participants: organisers, mentors, team members and webinar participants, to reflect on each step of Hackathon concept (Figure 1). The framework presents an opportunity to assess the inputs, methods and results to identify best practices and opportunities for improvements, and give feedback to the organisers. The following chapter describes the lessons learned from two hackathons.

5. Conclusions and Future Work

African agriculture needs to be smart and sustainable. This requires a large effort towards building capacity in Africa. To guarantee real transition of African Farming Sector to Smart Farming, it is not only possible to transfer solutions and experiences from other parts to Africa, but it is necessary to involve African researchers and developers to the process and support their active role. As one from the possibilities of how to support capacita and development in Africa we see common work of researchers and developers from Africa with researchers and developers from other parts of the world. We see common work as the best way and one of the potential models are virtual Hackathons. This can help together with new emerging technologies.

The emerging technologies that include earth observation solutions, sensor based systems, and mobility device interfaces that are driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are heavily dependent on the high-speed internet for communication and data storage. The internet also comes with the evolution of new knowledge that impacts all the corners of the world. The whirl speed digital evolution delivers new experiences to create synergies between science, education and training, and development practice, among all the actors.

Before the onset of COVID-19 Pandemic, on-site Hackathon events presented opportunities for teams to work on different challenges against which they were judged on predetermined parameters. Hackathons have been associated with fast paced programmatic experiences and are an excellent approach for bringing together people from different work environments, culture and disciplinary backgrounds so that they can form teams around a problem or idea. ‘Hackathoners’ have always found opportunity to learn from peer teams, and collaboratively co-create unique solutions to address the many challenges that face the world today. The INSPIRE Virtual Hackathon is not just a multi-day event. It is a continuous co-creation process designed to effectively use results from previous hackathons to build enriching solutions to existing or foreseen challenges. The INSPIRE hackathons last several months as virtual events interspaced with practice after engagements.

The hackathon and each of its challenges forms an unique intellectual knowledge hub and social space that leverages scientific results, non-formal learning and co-creation patterns (Figure 2) to new knowledge and practices and concrete technical results (e.g. Desert Locust). The team members from diverse science and practice, domains and many countries share knowledge, train each other and seek solutions to advance African agriculture and to prevent hunger.

The social space was also used to draw some conclusions across the hackathon’s challenges, on commonalities and differences between the existing codes of conduct, guidelines, and regulations. It made it possible to extract and recommend the essential aspects and points for a general, scalable and further customizable code of conduct template that best addresses the farmers’ needs and their empowerment with more equitable data flows while taking into account the relevant national laws and regulations.

An international community addressing smart agriculture and Earth observations with strong African participation has been further enhanced by the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon, ready to be continued both in future hackathons and in other follow-up projects for example RDA (Research Data Alliance), GEO (Group on Earth Observation), EC (European Commission) and more.

The observations and improvements are taken into account in the forthcoming INSPIRE hackathon in Africa to enhance teams work to achieve concrete and sustainable results.

The Plan4all strategy is to continue and strengthen the cooperation with e.g GODAN, RCMRD (Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources of Development), AfriGEO, FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), IST Africa (Information, Science and Technologies- Africa monitoring ICT initiatives and research capacity) and extend it to other research and innovation actions on smart agriculture.

From two years experience we can conclude

1. Use of past research benefits the identification of challenges that new hackathons should focus on
2. Mentorship is critical to support hackathons through non-formal experiential learning
3. Learners benefit from dimensions of hanuman centered design thinking more so with co-creation in collaborative cross-challenge delivery of emerging practices, tools, insights and outcomes
4. Virtual hackathons are effective when well-designed for meaningful engagement to address challenges, mentors, capacity building and for supporting others as partners co-creators.

With organising these two hackathons we do not want to finish. We define some type of task or roadmaps for future:

1. Realizing the foregoing calls for localized frameworks to reach new hackathons and a pool of Mentors. GODAN’s National Open Data Champion Consortia can help achieve this
2. Co-creation calls for cross knowledge needs across the value chain, an organizational dimension as the P4CDA’s South-South FarmHub agenda makes SME driven agribusiness a necessary paradigm that Hackathons can measure impact from. Creating the FarmHubs as appendages of the Hackathon is not just necessary, it is important
3. Linkage with governments, development partners, research and academia is important for the sustainability of the Hackathons, there is need to promote the ESA Sentinel-driven linkage of the Earth Observation Solutions to support the Data Analytics and Innovation Centers to promote satellite based data sourcing