Reflections on World Water Day 2013

World Water Day has been observed since 1993 when the United Nations General Assembly declared 22th of March as World Day for Water. The theme this year 2013 was the International Year of Water Cooperation and to mark this I had the privilege of hosting a Smarter Friday chat on the People of a Smarter Planet Facebook page.

For this chat I got to work with the very impressive IBM media team. I was traveling back home from Paris, France, where I had been meeting a a number of water clients, and ran the chat from Charles de Gaulle Airport while being supported by the IBM media team, first in India and later from US. They had a number of announcements and articles about water that were posted at periodic intervals on Facebook and I had the task of commenting and replying to those posts.

I was most proud that one of my sons made the cover of the Smarter Planet Facebook page for the World Water Day chat. This picture was taken by a very talented friend of mine and it is one of my  favorites.

The first articles to be posted was one I wrote especially for World Water Day: Why the World Thirts for Smarter Water. Here is how it was introduced by the IBM team 

Worldwide, up to 60% of water is lost due to leaky pipes. I believe a combination of Instrumentation, Big Data Analytics & Cooperation can help us manage water better. 

Another article that was published builds on the theme for cooperation and talks about how IBM launches WaterWatchers, a mobile app, in South Afica. This really is a great example of how we can cooperate together and directly involves the citizen in water conservation. Basically when a citizen finds a leaky pipe or a broken manhole in the street they can take a picture of it and text or email that picture to the water authorities (see a picture of a leaky tap i found in Rome below). Since the picture has location information the water authorities know where the issue is and what it looks like. They can then prioritize these issues and send their water crews out to fix them on a priority basis. Suddenly the water authority has eyes everywhere, helping them keep their water network healthy and leak free.

My own personal connection to the WaterWatchers was that I was present in an IBM meeting room in Johannesburg, South Africa, when a very talented IBM marketing woman, Nicola Lupini, pitched this idea. Somehow she moved heaven and earth to get IBM Water Watchers funded, advertised  nationwide across South Africa, and up and running for World Water Day. My hat is off!. This is such a great idea which involves citizen cooperation, enabled by everyday technology, as well as giving them real ownership of water conservation and I hope to see it replicated in many places across the world by the next World Water Day in 2014.

After about 6 hours the chat wound down, it was time to board my plane back home to a cold and snowy Boston. It felt good to be a part of a world wide collaboration, it showed me how technology such a Facebook and our GPS, camera ready, mobile phones can enable cooperation by making us a Smarter Planet and can help us address some of the real issues we face with water worldwide. What he need is more good ideas about how to use these technologies effectively, what we need are more people like Nicola who can make these ideas into reality. I will leave you with the same sobering facts that I closed the chat with.

• Millions of the world's poorest subsist on fewer than five gallons per day 
• 46% of the people on Earth do not have water piped to their homes 
• In 15 years 1.8 billon people will live in regions of severe water scarcity

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