Call for Code - Unite Developers Against Natural Disasters

In 2018, David Clark Cause along with Founding Partner IBM commenced a multi-year global initiative, “Call for Code”. It aims at solving humanitarian issues with the help of open –source technologies in communities where these technologies are needed the most. In order to make a better society, this initiative inspires developers to solve pressing global problems by providing them access to IBM’s cloud data, technologies, and research so that we can have sustainable solutions to persistent problems.

The Call for Code initiative brings together teams of developers, start-ups, data scientists, business analysts, designers and SMEs from all over the world and give them the challenge to build open source solutions that are around safer society. In the year, 2018, over 100,000 developers from 156 nations built over 2500 applications using IBM cloud technology to reduce the impact of the natural disaster.

Last year’s winner provided a solution called OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics). This solution creates an offline communication infrastructure during natural disasters, giving those in need a simple and reliable interface to request assistance from authorities.

This year, the challenge focusses on the issues of healthcare in the aftermath of natural disasters. The developers are encouraged to create open source technologies for healthcare that reduces risk of disease, create options for emergency care, improve data and resource availability and help victims navigate psychological support needed throughout the crisis. Specifically, the developers are called to create solutions that address the following aspects of healthcare:

1. Food and water safety
2. Medical supply distribution
3. Tracking and halting disease epidemics
4. Access to medical health records
5. Mental health
6. Serving vulnerable populations

In order to participate in this challenge, one should join the Challenge Community. Upon signing up for the same, you will have an IBM Cloud account that provides you access to cloud data, blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence that will help you in building your solution. Adding on to it, you can also seek help from IBM Coder community, which will guide you in creating a submission, seeking help and building a team. Your entry to the competition will be valid once the solution is submitted between March 25 and July 29, 2019.

The content is very neatly curated around focus areas which will help developers gain context around the affected community, first responders, local authorities as well as technical resources. This content will continue to expand during the competition, which is around three areas, technology, disaster & healthcare.

Why Participate in Call for Code?

Well, the grand cash prize is definitely a motive to participate in this challenge, but if you have ideas that can create a big change then this platform is devised for you.

This campaign has provided a lot of resources and cloud applications to developers to help them sail through this challenge and the prerequisite for participating in this competition is to use the IBM catalog. If you are a newbie to these systems, developer advocacy is available to assist developers in getting hands-on to these systems. Additionally, developers can use open source libraries, open source code and write code in any language.

This is a great opportunity for developers to learn IBM’s latest tools and give your idea a shape to create an application to solve persistent global issues.

To provide developers the right information, this initiative has support from the United Nations Human Rights Office, American Red Cross’ international team and cross-section of experts. This year, Call for Code has a cash prize of $200,000 which will be presented at Call for Code event. Further, the winner will get open source project support from Linux foundation, meetings with mentors and potential investors and solution implementation support through Code and Response.