This has been a pretty exciting week full of meetings and a bit of writing (find my thesis body and intro doc):
First I met the Operative Coordinator of the Colombian Campaign Against Landmines, Camilo Serna and here are the main take aways from that meeting:
- “It would be interesting if the app can help demining NGO’s to build the non-technical survey, because so far in Colombia except for 3 municipalities (out of 688 affected by landmines) that information does not exist.”
- The international standard to deliver a zone whit out landmines is HF (which means a zone with no suspected hazardous areas) but even under those conditions there are always uncertain zones where the suspicious hasn’t been completely discarded.
- For the development of your project it is vital to ask the government for official information about released zones (zones with technical survey) in order to plan an accurate pilot to try the app.
- Once the existing information had been collected I can give you access to our network with more than 520 volunteers in the rural zones of Colombia to start with the field work.
Then I met the scientific and technical committee of integral action against landmines Integrated by members of the Army, National Parks System of Colombia, Indumil (National weapons company for the Colombian Government) and the National University of Colombia and during that meeting I did a presentation or the project to the committee and the main take aways are as follows:
- The app could be a great asset for officials of the national park network.
- There is a concern about connectivity in certain regions of the country.
- For the military app it’s important to point out that most of the planted landmines in Colombia are non-conventional explosive devices which makes the process even harder. However, they are willing to provide detailed information about this artifact in order to develop an accurate solution.
- They can give me access to the existing non technical survey information.
- Support from the army in order to get the accurate information of the demining process.
- They want to know the deadline for the beta releasing of the app.
And Last but not least, I had my weekly meeting with my thesis advisor Claudio Silva where we discussed about the previous meetings and we agreed on the importance of start playing with some of the existing API’s to figure out how the APP should work.