As a part of the Microsoft Global Hackathon, fellow NZ and international Microsoftees are looking to give Indigenous and communities a voice on their stories with the land. This combined with environmental datasets can enhance decision making and help to create a better future for our people and planet, through the use of Bing Maps, Azure Cognitive Services and Power Apps.
Indigenous peoples globally steward more than 25% of the worlds lands and waters which protect 80% of the earths remaining biodiversity. It is therefore hugely important for policy makers understand the connection between land, culture, histories and community.
Government policy decisions, commercial and residential developments are often made without the understanding of the cultural impact of how indigenous people use the land for food gathering, spiritual well-being, burial sites, plants used for medicinal purposes and recreation.
Many stories of our indigenous people are passed down and not captured. Imagine if these stories were captured and pinned to a geographical location on a Bing map, and key words were tagged and searchable. What if these stories could then be linked to AI datasets to pull better insights for the future such as our Microsoft Planetary computer?
In this year’s Global hackathon event at Microsoft, a team of fellow Microsoftees brought together the Indigenous & Sustainability pillars with volunteer employees from Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. It is completely made with Microsoft solutions – Bing Maps, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Functions, App Service as well as Power Apps.
Their goal is to give Indigenous and communities a voice on their stories with the land, so that it can be combined with environmental datasets (such as the Microsoft Planetary Computer) to enhance decision making and help to create a better future for our people and planet.
Microsoft have been partnering with Method, a supplier of smart bins for the workplace which separate recyclable plastic & paper/cardboard and organic/compostable from landfill waste. Each type of waste is weighed to provide reporting on how much of each waste type an office location has. The goal is to see landfill waste reduce over time as people are made more aware of their choices by seeing the reporting from Method. For the hack the team plans to extend this by creating a Power App (with Azure Image Detection) that can be used to take a picture of different types of waste to guide the user in what type of waste it is (organic, mixed recycling, paper recycling and landfill). The other focus for the hack is overlaying Microsoft NZ’s 5 year goal to achieve zero waste with further developments of the Method programme, to be decided during the Ideation phase of the hack.