Lead image by jatorre on flickr

Today, we are excited to announce the next EcoHack World, the continuation of our three year mission to bring scientists, journalists, digital storytellers, software engineers, designers, and other hackers into the same room to tackle issues that matter. If you haven’t been before, EcoHack is about using technology to improve and better understand our natural environment, creating things that will have an impact, with no restrictions on how you get there. In the past, EcoHack has hosted everything from teams creating data visualizations to teams building kites to fly cameras. We have seen that by giving people an opportunity to collaborate on important environmental challenges that we can come up with innovative solutions.

It’s Global!

For the first time ever, EcoHack will be a global event, with hackathons in New York City, San Francisco, and São Paulo, Brazil happening at the same time. This year Public Lab, Vizzuality, World Resources Institute, and Environmental News Lab have teamed together to organize this two day event across these locations.

New Climate Track

The Obama administration is today launching the Climate Data Initiative, an initiative to help individuals, organizations, and governments better understand the effects of climate change. The initiative is focused on the use of open data to help advance environmental science, preparedness, and education. In support of this important initiative, we have added a Climate Track to EcoHack World. We are going to look for the most interesting and innovative hack proposals related to climate change to bring to our events. If you have an app or visualization idea related to climate change, consider submitting to one of our three EcoHack locations. We’ll work hard to support your project and all the teams at the events.

If you can be in one of our three host cities on May 9th and 10th, register for free and be sure to join us! If you have an important project you want to build a team around at EcoHack, be sure to submit those through the EcoHack website soon!