Each year, the Chapterthon project competition brings enthusiasm and excitement among our global community. We look forward to this time of year, when our communities mobilize and work alongside each other to achieve a common goal for the development of the Internet.
For the 2019 Chapterthon, we are delighted to announce that 34 Chapters and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) from across the globe have started implementing their work on local solutions that will bring some of the hardest-to-reach places and community segments online—connecting the unconnected.
Over the next two months, these 34 projects will:
- connect underprivileged and rural areas in Armenia, Bangladesh, Benin, Mali, and South Africa;
- build a community network in Kenya;
- establish online databases for rural farmers in Burkina Faso and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines;
- create an online audio library for people living with disabilities in northern rural Argentina;
- revolutionize a mobile network unit in Madagascar for use in the event of a natural disaster;
- educate and empower over fifty rural women on how to use the Internet during a friendly game of “Tag”;
- build an FM broadcast system in rural Ghana; preserve Indigenous culture in rural Brazil;
- sweat it out at a bootcamp in Trinidad and Tobago to improve digital accessibility; and
- provide Internet access to rural and remote schools and libraries in Colombia, Dominican Republic, Gambia, Paraguay, and Senegal.
And this is just a segment of the exciting work that our Chapters will be engaging in over the next two months. If you would like to learn more about these projects, please visit 2019 Projects page.
As our Chapters complete their projects, they will each produce a 3-minute video, summarizing their project and its outcomes. They will share these videos with us, and through a combination of community voting (all Internet Society members are able to vote on the project(s) they like most) and a panel of experts that will have a closer look at the details of each project, three winning projects will be chosen to receive a prize!
We invite all Internet Society members and those of our larger community to take part and help us vote on the winning projects. Please stay tuned and mark your calendars! Voting takes place from 25 November to 5 December, and every vote counts!
If you’d like to take a glance at the creative and inspiring projects that participated in last year’s competition to help ‘shape the future of the Internet of Things’, here are those videos.
Thank you to everyone who applied for this year’s Chapterthon! Dedicated to finding innovative solutions to connecting the half of the population who remain unconnected, these projects will go a long way to helping some of the most remote corners of the world get online. Something we’re very excited about! Because the Internet is for everyone, and we won’t rest until everyone has the choice to be connected.
Thank you for helping us connect the world, one community at a time.
Visit Chapterthon 2019 Projects page
Image credit: Internet Society / Nyani Quarmyne / Panos Pictures