Meet.26: Open Hardware for the Environment

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The 26th ODHK gathering was a “meet the Open Science working group” special, with Cesar Harada as guest speaker on the topic of “Open Hardware for the Environment”. Cesar’s work covers many many flavours of open: open hardware, citizen science, open education, open environmental data collection, crowdsourcing, biohacking and more. Open Science probably is probably a good catch-all for many of these activities, so Scott Edmunds (the ODHK Open Science working group lead) started proceedings with an introduction (or rant) about where these areas fit in the Open Data pantheon, and what the “open” situation is in Hong Kong.

Cesar Harada (31 French-Japanese) is an inventor, Environmentalist and Entrepreneur working in Hong Kong. Cesar is the CEO of Scoutbots, recently listed by Fast Company as one of China’s top 10 most innovative companies, is building shape-shifting sailing robots to collect ocean data. Cesar developed this new sailing technology on the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, after resigning from MIT where he was a Project Leader. Cesar will speak about his expeditions in Fukushima Japan to collect seabed radioactivity data, his teaching activities, working with young students in Hong Kong to develop plastic pollution sensors, DIY water contamination spectrometers and spectrofluorometers. Cesar is currently busy building Hong Kong’s largest makerspace MakerBay.org: a shared workshop / lab for Artists, Designers, Engineers and Scientists. Most of Cesar work both academic and commercial is Open Hardware, and we were fortunate to get a #101 on that topic, as well as hear about the other amazing work he has been doing. You can see Cesar’s slides here.


For more see this profile on Cesar in SCMP, as well as his TED talk (below) on shape shifting robots and Protei.Whether you’re already familiar with Open Data or just want to find out what it is, we welcome you all to come to our regular meetups. No technical skills required. Come out and meet fellow Hong Kong Open Data enthusiasts. A special birthday Meet.27 will be on 31st March at Delaney’s Wan Chai, so watch this space for more details.

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Monday, March 9, 7:15pm
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