Water Scarcity, Tech and Public Policy –EdBoard

The GovLab Editorial Board Meetings (“EdBoard”) showcase news and events that encourage thought and discussion about The GovLab’s work.
EdBoard is a twice-weekly opportunity for The GovLab team to reflect on how approaches and technologies could help solve problems differently with an eye toward ensuring our work creates real-world impacts. More than anything, EdBoard is about getting people talking.
Each EdBoard is led by one or two members of The GovLab team. Recaps of each EdBoard meeting are posted on our blog each week.
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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

As stated by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, water scarcity is among the main the main problems to be faced in the 21st Century, already affecting 1.2 billion people. Today’s meeting addressed that concern, inspired by the article “Water shortages more pressing than climate change, warns Nestlé head” published this morning by the Financial Times.

Source: The growing problem of water scarcity
How new approaches and technologies could help solve these problems differently?
Based on the Financial Times article, the GovLab team discussed the new possibilities open data offers in terms of  research, international collaboration and the aiding of decision and policy-making. Furthermore, crowdsourcing initiatives could also give citizens a meaningful role to play in reporting water shortages and/or proposing solutions, among other opportunities.
Below are a few examples of organizations exploring how the use of technology could help tackle the water scarcity problem:

• Open Water Foundation: an organization that develops open source software to help decision-makers base their decisions on data and science. The foundation provides tools that can be used to evaluate large, complex, data-intensive systems through data processing and visualization. See some of their projects HERE, which are seeking to answer questions about water quality and supply.
• mWater: a not-for-profit tech startup that uses crowdsourcing through a mobile phone app so that users “instantly test and analyze water quality from local sources” and at the same time share this information to a global, open-source water monitoring database. Learn more, HERE.

Join our conversation!
Do you know of additional examples that address this issue? Please leave us your comments or even better, contribute them to our wiki by filling out this short form!
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