[python-uk] ANNOUNCEMENT: Python West Midlands Evidence for Development Hackday, 26th May

[Sarah Mount]

Calling all FOSS contributors! This hackday is a little different.
Python West Midlands is hosting a hackday to kick off a new open
source project for a very interesting little charity called Evidence
for Development(EfD). EfD wants to help people make better decisions
about aid projects – at local and national level – by putting real
data about the real situation in the hands of the people making the
decisions.

If you want to know if your aid programme is making a difference to
the right people then you need to model the economy of your target
village or district, before and after. Makes sense; simple science
right? Problem is you can' afford a bunch of western econometricians
crawling all over the place (cost too much, takes too long) and anyway
their cash-based economic models don't work that well in a place where
cash is only a small part of the economy (grow your own; harvest wild
food; get paid in kind or cash or both for day labour; trade crops,
labour or other goods; etc, etc). So EfD developed simple economic
models that work in this environment, that can be learned and applied
by locally trained people and that, are built to run on laptops. No
reliance on big foundations' data centres.

Last year EfD, in partnership with Chancellor College of the
University of Malawi and The University of  Wolverhampton developed a
Python/MySQL app to model local economies that is already in use in
several countries in Southern Africa.

This year the challenge is bigger – to build software that can model
national and international economies. The model exists and works (it
has a great track record of predicting famine effects from annual
summary surveys of rural economies). But the only current
implementations are proprietary, ill-supported and not extensible.
Smells like open source spirit.

So for this hackday we're going to have with us the two developers who
led the IHM development last year (from Chancellor College in Zomba,
Malawi) and the developers of the modeling methodologies from EfD
(from Barnes and Surrey – exotic eh?). We'll have a pretty complete
MySQL database schema to work on and we hope to finish the day with a
simple demo scenario that downloads reference data about a
geographical area (a livelihood zone) produces a spreadsheet template
to capture information about that livelihood zone (what they grow
there, what they eat, how they make a living) runs some local
completeness reports and uploads the captured data for merging (with
other livelihood zone surveys) to allow analysis of a national survey.

*** Date ***

10:30 onwards, 26th May. Please sign up here for a (free) ticket:
http://efdhacks.bitbucket.org/

*** Location ***

Thyme Software
Innovation Centre
Coventry University Technology Park
Puma Way
Coventry
CV1 2TT

Map: http://g.co/maps/4mj43

Please sign up here for a (free) ticket: http://efdhacks.bitbucket.org/

-- 
Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton
website:  http://www.snim2.org/
twitter: @snim2