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

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.