Topics 2019

Our topics selected for the 2019 edition are inspired by friends and colleagues working at Terres des Hommes, gluoNNet, Deep, United Nations and many other NGOs in and around Geneva.



  • Team Pier12

    Hidden hunger is a lack of proteins, minerals and vitamins. One person out of three is affected by it and poor diet causes over 40% of child mortality. Insect products contain nutrients that are often absent in conventional food items. They can help to complement the common diet. The production aspects have had far less attention than the food science research.
    The Pier12 team will be challenged to improve rearing conditions in larvae farming. Goal is to increase protein and micronutrient intake in areas where poverty, living conditions or scarcity of land limit traditional farming. The team will deal with container design, control of breeding conditions and knowledge exchange between local farmers.

    Insect Farming for Better Nutrition

  • Team Pier47

    Food, its cultivation, preparation and consumption as well as the connected service, products and emotions are a cultural heritage. A variety of databases capture the importance and the different “flavors” of food but do not map the associated emotions. We aim at bridging this gap using augmented reality, embedded technologies and other digital means.

    The Take-Away Cultural Food Experience

  • Team Pier91

    Transport, particularly air travel, is a major contributor to climate change. Almost every type of business relies on travel for meetings, conferences, even hackathons. Despite the rapidly improving technology, remote collaboration hasn’t really taken off yet.
    This team will investigate what it takes to make remote collaboration successful. They will do experiments, look for gaps in technology and find ways to match the human needs in collaboration despite these shortcomings.

    Green Remote Collaboration

  • Team Pier05

    Over three billion people use traditional biomass for cooking, causing 4 million deaths annually. This burden falls heavily on women and girls who spend much of their time around open fires in confined spaces and collecting fuel wood. The environmental impacts are also negative, it causes CO2 emissions, soot and deforestation. Refugees and migrants are even worse affected, relying for 80-90% on biomass for their energy supply.
    The goal of this challenge is to produce a working cookstove prototype which is safe, reliable and clean (does not cause adverse health effects). The stove should adequately replace an open fuel fire in terms of cooking effectiveness and be suitable in an off-grid or refugee context.

    Off-Grid Cooking

  • Team PierX7

    The registration of cars and other transportation vehicles is a challenge in many west African countries. An mobile application that will allow every citizen who buys a new car to go through the car licence plate application by indicating all information in a few minutes can overcome many disadvantages of the current registration systems, especially corruption and bribery. Putting these kinds of software in place will not only save time and money for government and users, but it will be much cheaper compared to travel and the usual waiting periods in front of the offices that take hours and hours of work or even days for some.

    Easy Registration - Less Fraud

  • Team PierX8

    Bonfire is an experimental community of engineers, researchers, and designers. They want to stimulate open source projects, crypto-economics studies and cooperative model experiments. A network of physical spaces, allegorically referred to as bonfires, is meant to facilitate this goal.
    At THE Port, the X-pier will do a sprint to solve the most direct challenges to create these bonfires. Firstly, upgrading the fund governance model and secondly writing the statutes of a Swiss association that would be linked to this model. Finally they want to reach out to other non-profit organizations and potential collaborators in the Geneva area.

    Collaborative Digital Nomads

Teams 2019

Six inter-disciplinary teams with about 10 members each had 6 weeks of preparation time with video-conference meetings and a 60 hour final hackathon to build working prototypes and tangible solutions for real-life humanitarian problems.



Global coach entrepreneurship: Felix Stähli – Knowledge transfer: CERN KT

Team: Insectus

Insect Farming for Better Nutrition





Team: Food Culture

The Take-Away Cultural Food Experience



Team: NoFlyConference

Green Remote Collaboration



Team: Stovathon

Off-Grid Cooking



Team: Kilimanjaro

Easy Registration - Less Fraud



Team: Bonfire

Collaborative Digital Nomads



Partners & friends 2019

Our members, partners, sponsors and friends are from international and local non-governmental organisations and companies in and around Geneva, Switzerland.





Our team 2019

Without the enthusiastic voluntary work of our Organizing Team, Advisory Board and Executive Committee we could not work professionally – a big Thank You and it is fantastic to work with you.

Executive committee 2019

  • Ines

    Ines Knäpper

    Co-president &
    Founding Member

    CERN

    Project Manager with strong background in Intercultural Management, Sales and Customer Service.

  • Karolos

    Karolos Potamianos

    Co-president &
    Founding Member

    Berkeley Lab

    Physicist and engineer working on silicon detectors, currently on the data acquisition for the ATLAS Pixel Detector.

  • Agnes

    Agnes Jakab

    Humanitarian Advisor
    THE Port

    International HR & recruitment professional. Communication and volunteering enthusiast.

  • Daniel

    Daniel Dobos

    Treasurer &
    Founding Member

    THE Port

    Physicist working on Silicon & Diamond detectors development, integration and operation.

Organizing team 2019

Knowledge Transfer

Entrepreneurship Coach 2019

Advisory board 2019