Waste Management Hackathon Providing New Ideas to Increase Citizen Awareness, Motivation and Engagement

TL;DR

This paper discusses a hackathon focused on innovative ICT solutions for urban waste management, highlighting a citizen-engagement mobile app developed from a winning project that encourages community participation in waste collection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel citizen-centric mobile platform for waste management, developed through a hackathon and internship, promoting urban citizen engagement in waste collection activities.

Findings

The mobile app effectively organized waste collection events in real environments.

The hackathon successfully generated innovative ICT solutions for smart city waste management.

The winning project EcoQ demonstrated high potential for citizen engagement in waste activities.

Abstract

This paper describes the International Disruptive Information Solutions hackathon and one the winning solutions. The purpose of the hackathon was to promote the use of disruptive ICT technologies (e.g. IoT, Big data, AI, blockchain) in urban infrastructures to create innovative waste management solutions in a smart city context. 29 students enrolled into this hackathon and in the end 4 teams submitted their solutions to the challenges. The winning proposal EcoQ, an approach for plogging collecting trashes while jogging, answered more than well to the presented challenge on waste management and engagement. The original idea was extended and partly refocused during an internship. As the outcome of the internship a mobile application for organizing and holding waste collection events was developed. This mobile application was shortly tested in a real environment and it provides a working citizen-centric platform, which enables anyone to arrange waste management events, and motivates other residents to participate in these activities.