Message Relay Covid-19 reActions

It’s been a busy few weeks for the UM HEIDI team! In September Dawra Madwarna, a local NGO, invited the HEIDI team to showcase a walkability app during a webinar that focused on local planning and place-making. App developer Dr Carlos Canas discussed how Walking Malta and Citizen Science could be used in a local context for monitoring areas of beauty and also areas that needed a bit more love and attention. The app is designed so that people may use an existing app, WhatsApp, to send images with hashtags to describe what they find while walking. The data is then populated on a map to show the walkability of localities.

We also made the headlines as well! Think Magazine, the university’s publication, interviewed the  UM team about HEIDI and what the project means to both higher education institutions and community members. THINK also invited the team to speak about the project and the activities we’ve been organising at their quarterly soapbox event; a super get-together for academics and the general public to meet and for us to present our research in under three minutes! After we spoke, there was a really energetic Q&A about what digital action means, and how we can increase engagement through social equality. You can read about it here – https://thinkmagazine.mt/digital-proofing-society-to-face-future-crises/

During European Local Democracy week on 22nd Oct, the HEIDI team took to the streets in Senglea, Malta at a community gardening picnic. We showed people how to use the Walking Malta app to log images that showed areas of their locality that were safe and pleasant to walk about in, and areas that showed need of repair and cleaning. We found that locals were not aware of concepts such as Citizen Science but used WhatsApp regularly and therefore we were able to transfer knowledge on how to use Walking Malta easily and effectively. People were taken on mini tours of the streets they lived on and shown how to capture and send the images.You can find out more about Walking Malta here: http://walkingmalta.com/

Following on from the Co-Creation workshop which took place back in August, we gifted our student participants with vouchers to use at SCAN Ltd. a local computer and tech store. Olivia Schneider has decided to pay her vouchers forward and has donated them to Dar Hosea, an NGO which helps vulnerable women and children.