For companies and specialists
Where technologycan help now.
The August 26 flash flood in northern Nepal devastated communities and damaged roads, bridges, communications and critical infrastructure across the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli river system.
Nepal’s responders, scientists, technologists and institutions are already working on the response.
We are assembling additional expert teams around the problems they identify — and we need technology companies, researchers and specialists who can help.
That could mean
- an OpenAI engineer helping make thousands of reports and datasets searchable
- a Google Earth Engine specialist processing satellite imagery
- an NVIDIA computer-vision engineer helping analyze drone images
- an AWS or Microsoft cloud architect helping a useful system stay online
- a satellite company opening imagery or tasking capacity
- a hydrologist, glaciologist or remote-sensing scientist helping the technical team ask the right question in the first place
You do not need to travel to Nepal.
You may contribute three hours, three days or three months.
What matters is getting the right expertise, data, compute and technology around the right problem quickly.
None of the organisations named on this page is involved in Nepal Hackathon, and none has been approached on its behalf. They are named to describe the kind of capability that would help, not to claim a relationship.
This is not really a weekend hackathon
Nepal Hackathon is the name, but the model is different.
People already working on a problem in Nepal help create a clear brief: what is happening, what is already being done, what is missing, and what additional expertise or resources would actually help.
We then help assemble a team around that need. People can work together live when useful and asynchronously across countries and time zones afterward. Some teams may work on an urgent problem for several days. Others may keep going for weeks or months.
The goal is not to build something by Sunday night. The goal is to make expertise that normally sits in separate companies, universities and institutions available to people solving real problems in Nepal.
Where technology could make the biggest difference
We see five broad areas where additional technical capacity may be especially useful.
01 — See what happened: satellites, drones and geospatial technology
After a disaster, responders need answers quickly.
Nepal-based drone operators and institutions can determine where field collection is useful. International teams can help process and interpret the resulting data.
Satellite imagery can show changes across enormous areas. Drone imagery can provide much finer detail. GIS can connect those observations to roads, settlements, health facilities, hydropower and other infrastructure. Computer vision can help experts review far more imagery than they could manually.
- Is a road still open?
- Did a bridge survive?
- Where did the river change course?
- Which settlements appear damaged?
- Has a slope moved?
- Where should a field team investigate next?
We need
- Remote-sensing scientists
- GIS and geospatial engineers
- Computer-vision engineers
- Drone-imagery specialists
- Satellite-imagery analysts
- Cartographers
- CUDA/GPU engineers
Companies and resources that could help
- Google Earth Engine expertise
- Esri / ArcGIS expertise
- Planet, Maxar, ICEYE, Capella and other imagery providers
- NVIDIA GPU and computer-vision expertise
- Microsoft, Google and AWS cloud processing
- Drone hardware and processing tools
The ask is not just people. We also need imagery, satellite tasking, GPU capacity, APIs and compute.
02 — Make the information usable: AI, search and data infrastructure
A major disaster quickly produces an information problem: government notices, scientific studies, maps, situation reports, satellite images, drone photographs, spreadsheets, infrastructure databases, field observations and historical research.
Often the information already exists. The hard part is finding the right piece of it when somebody needs it.
The objective is not an AI system inventing answers. It is helping someone rapidly find the underlying evidence, source, map or dataset.
There is a second, less glamorous problem that may be equally important: cleaning and connecting the datasets themselves. If every team spends its first week finding and reconciling the same data, enormous effort is wasted.
- What do we already know about this valley?
- Has this bridge been assessed?
- What imagery exists from before the flood?
- Has someone already mapped these settlements?
- Which organization maintains this dataset?
- What previous research exists on this glacier?
We need
- Applied AI engineers
- Search and retrieval specialists
- Software engineers
- Data engineers
- API engineers
- Multilingual NLP specialists
- AI evaluation experts
- Knowledge-management specialists
Companies and resources that could help
- OpenAI and Anthropic engineers and API capacity
- Microsoft AI and data teams
- Google AI and cloud teams
- AWS data infrastructure
- Cloud storage and databases
- Document-processing and search infrastructure
03 — See danger sooner: monitoring, modelling and early warning
One of the hardest questions after any flood is whether dangerous conditions could have been recognized sooner. That question requires scientific caution: the exact chain of events behind the August 26 flood is still being studied, and no software model should pretend otherwise.
But Nepal and regional institutions already monitor rivers, weather, glaciers, snow, terrain and other environmental conditions. The opportunity may be to help those experts combine and process more of those signals — river-gauge data, weather and precipitation, glacier and snow change, satellite observations, terrain movement, historical events, anomaly detection and automated change monitoring.
A team might backtest a previous event, automate satellite comparisons or help experts identify places where conditions warrant closer attention.
Domain expertise has to lead this work. A great ML engineer without a hydrologist, glaciologist or geologist is not enough.
We need
- Hydrologists
- Glaciologists
- Geologists
- Climate scientists
- Remote-sensing researchers
- Forecasting specialists
- Data scientists
- ML engineers
- Early-warning experts
Resources that could help
- Historical satellite archives
- Current imagery
- Weather and hydrological data
- Cloud compute
- GPU capacity
- Research partnerships
- Long-term monitoring infrastructure
04 — Understand what is at risk: mapping infrastructure and resilience
A dangerous river, glacier or slope only tells part of the story. The next question is what is downstream: communities, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, hydropower, communications infrastructure, tourism routes and agricultural land.
A useful technical team could connect hazard information with infrastructure, population and accessibility data. That could help answer immediate questions during a response, and longer-term questions afterwards.
The useful result may not be an app. It might be a risk layer, infrastructure map, monitoring system or investment-priority model.
- Where would losing one bridge isolate thousands of people?
- Which communities have poor access to healthcare?
- Where would better communications matter most?
- Where could an early-warning system reduce the greatest risk?
- Where should resilience investment go first?
We need
- GIS specialists
- Civil and infrastructure engineers
- Economists
- Disaster-risk experts
- Climate scientists
- Data scientists
- Public-policy researchers
- Development specialists
05 — Keep useful technology working: cloud, connectivity and engineering
Building something useful is only half the problem. Can someone in Nepal still use it six months later? Who hosts it? Who maintains the data? How much does it cost? Does it work when connectivity is weak? Can it operate without one engineer’s personal credentials? Can another institution take it over?
Some of the most valuable people on these teams may therefore be the people who make technology boring and reliable.
Disasters also damage communications infrastructure, which means the technology itself may need to tolerate intermittent internet, limited power and ordinary hardware. Sometimes the most valuable contribution may not be software at all. It may be connectivity.
We need
- Cloud architects
- Backend engineers
- DevOps and SRE specialists
- Security engineers
- Networking engineers
- Offline/mobile engineers
- Technical program managers
Resources that could help
- AWS, Azure and Google Cloud credits
- API credits
- Satellite connectivity
- Portable networking equipment
- Managed infrastructure
- Monitoring tools
- 30-, 60- or 90-day technical support
What we are asking technology companies to do
We are not primarily looking for sponsorship logos. We are looking for capabilities.
- 01
Send specialists
Let employees join a defined problem team. That might be one unusually qualified person for a few hours or several engineers working asynchronously for weeks.
- 02
Unlock technology
Cloud credits, GPU capacity, AI and API credits, satellite imagery, satellite tasking, mapping APIs, datasets, connectivity, drone technology and processing infrastructure.
- 03
Help useful work continue
Some teams may produce work worth taking forward. They may then need technical support, infrastructure or relatively modest continuation funding for the next 30, 60 or 90 days. That can be more valuable than funding the event itself.
None of the organisations named on this page is involved in Nepal Hackathon, and none has been approached on its behalf. They are named to describe the kind of capability that would help, not to claim a relationship.
We also need scientists and domain experts
This cannot be a room full of software engineers deciding what Nepal needs. Technology should multiply domain expertise, not replace it.
We are especially interested in connecting with
- Hydrologists
- Glaciologists
- Geologists
- Climate scientists
- Civil engineers
- Disaster-response specialists
- Remote-sensing researchers
- Infrastructure experts
- Economists
- Public-health and development specialists
- Researchers with deep knowledge of Nepal
A strong team might beOne hydrologist in Nepal, one remote-sensing scientist, one GIS engineer, two software engineers, one satellite provider and one cloud architect. The combination matters more than the number of people.
How to contribute
If you have expertise or resources that could be useful, tell us:
- 01What do you know?
- 02What technology or data can you access?
- 03What kinds of problems have you solved before?
- 04How much time can you contribute?
- 05Can you work live, asynchronously, or both?
We will try to match that capacity to a problem identified by people already working on it in Nepal.
The bigger idea
Extraordinary expertise exists all over the world. It sits inside technology companies, universities, research laboratories, NGOs, government agencies and professional networks.
The problem is often not that the expertise does not exist. The problem is connecting it to the person who needs it, around a clearly defined problem, quickly enough to matter.
Imagine someone in Nepal saying: here is the problem. And within days, the right team begins forming around it. One person brings scientific expertise. Another writes software. Another provides imagery. Another unlocks compute. Another provides funding.
They may never be in the same room. They do not need to be. They need the same problem and a way to work together.
That is what Nepal Hackathon is trying to build. And if it works, the most important thing to emerge from this flood response may not be a particular map, model or piece of software. It may be a much better way for people in Nepal to reach the world’s expertise, technology and resources when they need them.