NEW YORK — June 23, 2014 — How do you solve overfishing in the Philippines, one of the top 10 producers of fish worldwide? It looks like there’s an app for that now.
From June 13, 10 pm and 40 hours of fishackathon later (in Boston, Baltimore, Miami, even Silicon Valley), a winner emerged: Hackers from the University of Berkeley-School of Information came up with a tool called Fish DB.
The tool is a three-pronged approach to the problem: for the “ideal world,” a browser-based mobile app for fishermen to submit registration and license applications; for the “real world,” the use of SMS text messages, which does not require internet access and lastly, a web app for government employees to process the submissions.
The mobile app was designed to be as usable as possible for even fishers with marginal literacy: many of the menu options include pictures or diagrams to supplement the textual descriptions. Yes, fishers will need a mobile phone.
To use the app, fishers register their boats, get fishing licenses, and report any illegal fishing activity that they observe. It serves both fishers who need to submit registrations and the government staff who process them.
The winning team from Berkeley received the grand prize: a free trip to the Philippines courtesy of The Office of Global Partnerships & Tone.
The purpose of the trip is to allow them to meet first hand with local fishers, researchers and local officials to get a deeper understanding of how technology can be integrated in coastal communities.
“The State Department organized the fish hackathon. Greenwave (committed to doing it in) in New York,” said Thomas Buck, deputy director of SSG Advisors. He provides assistance to corporate clients and government and non-governmental agencies in building sustainable developmental practices.
Sustaining fishing on a global scale is a major concern of John Kerry, US Secretary of State. In a statement, he said the ocean is being threatened in various ways. ‘It’s threatened by unsustainable fishing, by pollution, by climate change. Indeed, how we respond to these challenges is literally going to help determine the future of our planet.”