PAST EVENTS
RISK KNOW-HOW HACKATHON: Empowering communities to help solve real-life risk communication challenges
Every day, thousands of people all over the world are helping their communities to make sense of risk. These frontline risk communicators are people who take responsibility for sharing risk know-how in their communities and helping others to make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty. Many frontline practitioners are doing this work with limited support or tools and without access to the body of knowledge on risk assessment and communication based on international research and practice over many decades.
The Risk Know-How Project, led by Sense About Science in collaboration with the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, and supported by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, aims to helping practitioners to get access to and use this knowledge to help their communities manage risks. The Risk Know-How platform connects practitioners to global risk experts who can help them with specific problems.
About the Hackathon
This hackathon will present participants with some real-life problems that communities are facing and have them try to come up with specific solutions that help these community practitioners communicate the risks effectively but also share risk know-how with their community. Any proposed solutions will be presented to the communities and they will be invited to ask for support from the Risk Know-How project to help deliver resources to address the challenges.
At the hackathon, the facilitators will introduce the session and the concept of community risk practitioners. We will share some short case studies of the challenges they face and some examples of how some communities met those challenges. We will then share in detail the two specific help requests, with the help of the community risk practitioners themselves (either in person or online):
- Water quality risk for a community in Mexico
- Adoption of land-based livelihoods for coastal communities in the Philippines
Hackathon participants will then be divided into groups, and each group will be allocated one challenge. The session facilitators will also provide each group with a series of questions to help narrow down what form of support might be more useful. Participants will then have 2 hours to develop a solution for the community such as an outline or complete resource/training/material that can help address the problem. Each group will present their proposed solutions to a panel of practitioners who will provide feedback at the end of the Hackathon.
After the conclusion of the event, the organising team will write up a report summarising the proposed solutions and provide this to the risk practitioners in Mexico and the Philippines.