Cork projects win digital awards

TWO Cork-based projects were presented with awards at the .IE Digital Town Awards held at the Hodson Bay Hotel in Athlone on Wednesday.

Cork’s OpenLitterMap secured second place in the digital sustainability category at the awards, winning a prize fund of €4,000, for its work in mapping dumping and littering around Ireland.

A Skibbereen digital project aimed at supporting women returning to the workplace achieved highly commended in the education category.

The awards were created by .IE, Ireland’s national registry for .ie domain names, in 2021 as part of a broader four-year €1m investment in the IE Digital Town Programme, which encourages the use of digital technology for businesses, citizens, and communities.

The awards recognise and reward digitally inspired projects run by towns and local community groups. Each year, the awards offer a prize fund of €100,000 which is split across several categories.

Cork’s OpenLitterMap aims to reduce littering by showing the positive impact of litter-picking.

Tidy towns teams use an app, which allows them to tag litter into over 130 categories. Researchers can then identify the greatest causes of litter, including those by corporate brands. It provides a digital tool that can visualise litter problems within the wider community, and helps interested companies fulfil their environmental commitments, such as allowing staff time off to engage in litter-picking.

The tool uses artificial intelligence to make data collection easier and artificial reality, similar to Pokemon Go, for visualisation.

Meanwhile, Skibbereen’s training programme prepares workforce returnees, usually women who have taken career leave for family reasons, to re-enter local and remote employment.

The key focus is on IT and digital literacy as well as networking, communications, and team-building. Training is delivered in workshops and content is available through a learning management system.