Make for the Planet is back! And this time, rather than the atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building, it’ll be in beautiful, sunny, Sarawak, Borneo!
Trading the robot orangutans for actual orangutans.
To ensure a better future for our planet, conservation experts need to work with solutions, technologies, and expertise from diverse fields to greatly improve the efficacy, speed, cost, scale, and sustainability of conservation efforts. Ocean acidification, invasive species, marine protection, overfishing, coral reef degradation – we are aware of the many problems faced by our oceans, and humankind has the ingenuity and optimism to solve them!
How can you help solve ocean conservation challenges? Participate in Make for the Planet Borneo and create solutions to conservation challenges in front of a global audience at the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC5) in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia June 24-29, 2018! Team applications are open now through April 1st, 2018. Apply here!
Make for the Planet is an exciting, fast-paced, collaborative, and hands-on invention competition for multidisciplinary teams to build software and/or hardware solutions in response to specific conservation challenges. Conservation X Labs will host up to 15 teams from ASEAN and surrounding countries to compete in Make for the Planet Borneo. This is a team competition/hackathon to create hardware and/or software solutions to specific marine conservation challenges. The event will engage students and practitioners from multiple fields – engineering, design, do-it-yourself making, computer programming, science and technology, etc. – to create solutions for five specific marine conservation challenges. Teams will have access to a pop-up makerspace with prototyping equipment, including 3D printers and electronics stations. Mentors from the IMCC5 delegation and local organizations will be on-hand to help guide the multidisciplinary teams. During the event, teams will build physical and/or digital representations of their solutions for review by a panel of judges. Because no global conservation challenge can be solved in a 5-day marathon of making and coding, selected teams will be awarded cash prizes to continue developing and improving their ideas.
Read about the Washington D.C. Make for the Planet during the Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism Summit in April, 2017.