Google is challenging you to come up with an innovative solution that: Helps individuals understand their personal impact on climate change and/or enable them to act to reduce personal emissions. The final product can take any form but must involve a live demonstration with a technical component.
Participants are encouraged to find use cases and can narrow the scope of their project as long as it falls within the bounds of the overall problem statement. Please feel free to bounce ideas off Oli and Max when it comes to scoping portions of the project.
An example use case that we have within Google Flights is: Google Flights helps users to quantify how many KG CO2 a flight will emit. This enables users to make a sustainable choice by choosing a less emitting flight.
Find the slides here
Find the slides here
Useful Background Context:
- UN ten personal actions: https://www.un.org/en/actnow/ten-actions#unplug
- Google Sustainability website: https://sustainability.google
Hackers can make use of any of the below datasets or any other government or vetted datasets they find themselves.
Google Datasets / APIs:
- Flights emissions: https://developers.google.com/travel/impact-model/docs/reference/rest/v1/flights/computeFlightEmissions
- Gmail API: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest
- Eco friendly routes: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/routes/eco-routes
Government Datasets:
- UK Goods + Electricity footprint data: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uks-carbon-footprint
- USA Washington State vehicle population data: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/electric-vehicle-population-data
Other APIs / Datasets:
- Electricity Maps Free developer API: https://www.co2signal.com/
You can use Google Cloud's free offerings to access the flight emissions API, other free APIs, and some free hosting options (it is not necessary to have your solution hosted, but if we have something that we can access that'd be amazing!). No specifc technology is suggested or required - use whichever technology that gets the job done and you're comfomable with.
If you want some technology pointers (if you are stuck on what to use to prototype quickly) please talk to Oli or Max.
Potential climate impact 40%:
- Can this solution achieve Incremental improvements for many people or major improvements for few people?
- How well does this solution solve your scoped problem?
Creativity & innovation of solution 20%:
- How original are these ideas?
Technical sophistication & feasibility 40%:
- Is this solution backed properly by different data sources or does it only use hardcoded demo data?
- How generalized is this technical solution? Does it only work in certain demo cases?
- Are there fundamental issues preventing a real implementation?
- We fully understand the time constraints of the Hackathon. Prototypical code and lack of automated tests is acceptable.
Please note: Even though this is a Google sponsored hack case your solution DOES NOT need to use Google APIs or be hosted on Google Cloud or be directly connected to Google in any way.
Oliver Dolk and Max Vogler will be glad to answer your questions during the Deep Dive. We’ll also be available on Discord.
- Face-to-face lunch with the Travel Sustainability team
- Google Zurich office tour
- Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen)