The AquaHacking Youth delegation: Reconnecting youth to their water body

Olivier was a youth delegate for the 2017 AquaHacking forum for the protection of Lake Erie. As part of this delegation, he participated in a retreat and think thank, reaching out to water experts, farmers, legislators, fishermen, indigenous communities and members of the wider public in order to get the pulse of their connection and variety of interests for the protection of Lake Erie.

The AquaHacking Youth Delegation presenting the results of their investigation during the Forum

Together they produced a declaration of a vision for 2020 for the protection of Lake Erie.

Olivier and Gaspard were testing water quality using an open-source spectro-photometer, along with Jack, a citizen from the shores of lake Erie

As we were brainstorming and encountering people from the community, we youth delegates noticed that, while many people were worried about the protection of the lake, few youth followed into taking action, simply because they don’t know how, working alone they can make a real difference for an issue that seems so large. There is a lack of knowledge of the diversity of the local ressources to which they can easily have access. We were convinced that we need to use new technologies and social media to help the youth gain more informations and opportunity to connect to the real change initiatives around them.

This is why we developed a web platform named LakeErieConnect to centralize and facilitate the discovery of the mode of action for the community that is best suited for the needs of the next generation of water protectors.

Members of the public testing the quiz on the platform Erie Connect during the forum. 

One of the major observations made by the Youth delegation is the need to update the ways to engage the public in the age of social media, and the perks of gamification to facilitate engagement