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Every year, natural disasters kill around 90,000 people, according to the WHO. The mortality rates alone are staggering, and unfortunately, the health impacts don’t end with lives lost. The primary focus after a disaster is on helping people who sustained injuries or are at risk of health complications but damaged or destroyed medical facilities prevent timely access to emergency medical care — and that’s just one of the health challenges.

The goal of this article is to reach out to developers and align them to develop a solution to mitigate the impact of natural disasters. Call for Code, which media refer as “The Noble Prize for Developers” was founded by David Clark Cause alongside Founding Partner IBM.

Call for Code Global Challenge motivates developers to create solutions that significantly improve preparedness for natural disasters and relief when they hit to safeguard the health and well-being of communities. David Clark Cause and IBM had launched Call for Code, this multi-year global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their skills and mastery of the latest technologies, and to create new ones, to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world with their code. 

In 2018, IBM hosted the Code City Challenges in the locations including Amsterdam, Bengaluru, Berlin, Delhi, Dubai, London, Paris, Sao Paulo, Kerala, Bayamón, Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco. A similar arrangement is expected this year too.

WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE

If you are alone and have no team members, You can still join the Code Day Sessions to find teammates or you can also find teammates through IBM Coders Community. You can be a team of up to 5 individuals. You don’t have to start from scratch. As IBM code patterns are ready to use and code modules can be deployed within minutes. You can start as soon as any idea clicks your mind, as it provides answers to certain parts of your solution. With patterns for data analysis, image classification, blockchain development, and more, it provides hundreds of reusable codes that will save you a lot of time coding and spend more on designing the best solution.

Call for Code is a great chance for the developers to connect within themselves, test own ideas and increase experience. The initiative has the support from an ecosystem comprised of a cross-section of experts, humanitarian and international organizations, including the United.

Norms and Deadline 

29th July 2019 is the last date and this is the webpage for registration. Teams are needed to be created at the discretion of individual participants with no more than five individuals. Options to find other team members are available through the IBM Coder community. To enter the 2019 Call for Code competition the team leader requires the following information to submit their solution:

• The name for the solution or team in five words or less (submission name)
• Description of the team’s solution in 10 words or less (short description)
• Description the solution in more detail of what one going to build, what problem will it solve, and why it matters in less than 500 words (long description)
• How mature is the submission and where does the developer intend to take it from here (solution roadmap)
• Link to GitHub or another source code repository such as GitLab
• The team can provide additional description and diagrams
• A three-minute demo video of your project on YouTube or Vimeo
• List of IBM Cloud Services or IBM Systems used in the solution- Join the Challenge Communityto get an IBM Cloud account
• Email addresses of up to four additional team members. Each will need to accept the Participation Agreement. An individual can only be part of one team of up to 5 members, and one team can only submit one application
• Submitted projects need to be under Apache 2 License (Free Software license)

In the recent past, we have published multiple guides to demonstrate the usage of IBM Watson IoT with ESP32.  We have shown a basic example of using Watson Visual Recognition with ESP32. If your project uses IoT then you may route through Node-RED.

Visit IBM’s website on Call for Code for more resources.

The winner of the first Call for Code Global Award received $200,000, open source project support from The Linux Foundation, an introduction to a venture capital firm, and piloted their solution in Puerto Rico through the IBM Code and Response™ initiative. This year, it’s your turn.