Challenge Results and Wrapup
The SDGinsights Challenge at the UN has completed. Chaîne didn't win but that's what we expected. The winner is a well executed project – "Combining water point data and machine learning to predict the potential spatial distribution of specific type or group of drinking-water source/service" – that closely matched the Challenge parameters, by Weiyu Yu, Jim Wright, and Nicola Wardrop.
This review of the Chaîne project was posted by one of the judges:
Thanks for taking part in the challenge. This is really interesting work, and it is clear that a lot of thought has gone into it. It doesn't align very well with this particular challenge, but it has many fascinating ideas. One area that I had a question about is how the structure would work beyond the main chain (global) and the child chains, and how data would feed into these chains from sub national systems and data collection, or from the myriad other data producers, including many UN agencies. The ideas are really interesting to read and I liked the fact that you showed links to other challenge ideas and that data produced by them could link into the chains. Thanks and good luck with the continued development of this work.
In the process of doing the Proof of Concept we learned a lot about IPFS. It's really impressive! Both the thinking behind it and the ease of use are exceptional. For instance, files stored in IPFS have a filename which is the hash of the file. So if we refer to a file by providing a URL, you can be 100% sure that it's the data we uploaded. If the file has been edited or hacked, it'll have a different hash. The IPFS installation was a breeze. It requires getting down on the command line, but the instructions were clear and commands executed as expected, with no errors or arcane dependency problems to puzzle over. "It just worked". First we setup IPFS on a Mac laptop and learned the protocol, such as how to upload and pin files. Then we setup an instance on an AWS machine, added content, and used that for the PoC. It went seamlessly. Bravo IPFS!
ps: On the UNite Ideas main page they've announced that 10 new challenges are coming in January (create an account to be notified when they are launched).