 Hi, everyone. Sorry for the slight delay. My name is Daniel Carranza. I'm from Data Uruguay, which is an organization you should be seeing the logo of if this was working properly. And I work basically on open government and open data. Gracias. Creating tools and stuff like that to help people either know about the rights or exercise them, or at least take informed decisions. The most flashy part of what we do is the tools, like the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is don the recycler or to recycle. But to be able to do that, we need to build a community around the issues that we work on. And we need to do a bunch of advocacy to actually get data so we can work on those issues. We are somewhat in the middle of open government incidents like the classical NGO side of things and civic tech. And today, you're here to learn a little bit about what we've been doing on recyclables and recycling and recycling infrastructure, which I need to clarify that I needed to get you into the room. So I needed a catchy title. But actually, recyclables are not garbage. Sorry about that. This is basically the end of the road, the result, what we have today with Don del Reciclo, which is an app that allows you to get information on dozens, if not hundreds, of different recycling programs, both in Uruguay and Colombia, with both locations where you can drop off your recyclables and also services that you have available wherever you live or where you work. And they can go pick you up or you can leave and they can pick you up specifically, stuff like that. Nothing very fancy, nothing very special. Let me just be very clear about that. We are not inventing anything complicated here. The complicated thing is getting very, very, very dispersed information and very different information into one unified platform. So that's the problem, basically. We started in Uruguay back in 2013. We started with a very simple approach, where although there were a bunch of different programs, procedures, and accepted materials, et cetera, which resulted in very low recovery, basically. We just went with the easy part. We got open data from the local government of Montevideo. And we put that on a map. Because you know, back in 2013, we thought that if you put data on a map, obviously you're going to save the whales and everything, right? Well, no. It was basically HTML plus Google Maps, points on a map, just left it there, waited for the recyclables to fix themselves thanks to our wonderful effort. And it was not tremendously useful at the end. However, we got lucky. By 2016, we didn't really believe that was the way to go, thankfully. And some very cool people at an organization called Sempre Uruguay, which is a weird NGO that is funded by the Chamber of Industry of Uruguay. So they are an NGO, but they are funded by industry. So they are in an uncomfortable place. But they're still an NGO. We were able to partner with them. They brought in their expertise, their support. They were able to get a lot of new data sources because they had this link with industry. We had a first attempt to standardize the sort of information that we needed because we created the platform, we created a data model, and we tried to get people to buy into that data model. And we also were able to have a first attempt at letting people run these programs, self-admin their information, their data on our platform. You want to guess how that went? Really bad, because people are not really keen into having something else to do. It's amazing. I never thought about that, especially when you have a platform that is not your own and that you have to learn how to manage. That partnership also brought very importantly sustainability. They brought in sponsors because they were linked with the Chamber of Industry. And one of the real, the secret sauce of this project at this point is that they were able also to do this aikido with what we call the packaging law in your way, where companies who put packaging into the market are forced to recover it in some way. So that was the incentive for them to support the project so they can show government that they are actually doing something about it. And that has been basically the way that we were able to survive from 2016, actually 2015, which is when we started to work on the version 2 on. On the tech side, we went for a much more ambitious data model. We started adding a lot more information. I'm not going to delve into the videos. I'd love to nerd out if we can do it outside, but we don't have the time now. And we went also into 2016. You had to have a Moai lab. So we went into Ionic using Angular. And I know this is a bad decision. Now we use Drupal as a back end. I know, I know. We were young. A couple of years went by. And the thing actually caught on. We were able to get people interested. We were able to get the government interested because they didn't have this centralized information, although it's very arguable that they should have. So we went into a version 3.0, which also a lot of very lucky timing somehow coincided with interest from Colombia, a partner organization in Colombia, also same logic, that wanted to do the same stuff that we were doing back in Uruguay. So we were able to launch what we have now, which implied a tech update and everything that I will tell you about in the future. But a big step into maturity in having the right support for what we needed. We realized, as you can see in every step, that the project was less about technology and more about humans, you know, this thing, and having the infrastructure to support the collection of information, the update of information, and stuff like that. We created a support platform. We use this open source software. I forgot to say, sorry, everything we do is open source and with open data. We are using UVDesk to have a support platform, which was extremely useful to track the messages we get. Because through that, we get updates, corrections, reports. And basically, we are able to have the most up-to-date information on all recycling reception systems, even more than the programs themselves, which are not as aware of the things that are happening. We are actually notifying them right now. The data model, I'm very proud of this, honestly. We were able to build something that is extremely flexible so we can include all sorts of programs in Uruguay and Colombia, both that have locations, that have service, that pick up at your house, that you have to leave at some special place, and they pick up on specific dates or specific times. We were able to contemplate a bunch of necessities that also had to do with sponsors, you know? People that wanted to show off their special new program or whatever so we can put a special pin with your logo or whatever, or a special color. And all those needs were built into this app that has been able to respond to these needs, both in Uruguay and Colombia. I already talked about sounds and services. And we also added last year, we call it dimensions of the circular economy, so we're not only working on recycling now, but also composting, repairing, reuse, and stuff like that. On the sustainability side, we went into a model that really has worked out, which involves not continuous funding. That's something that we haven't been able to get and it's really hard to get because sponsors are not into giving you money every single month for a long time. But we have found this way to create projects a long time, like a couple of projects a year. And that gives us an excuse to get more funding and to add new features to the platform. This is a mixture of public funds being available through competitions or whatever or challenges, and actually selling these ideas to sponsors. Sometimes those respond to their needs. Like I was talking about this, they like to put logos and colors. So in Colombia recently, they had some of these new routes sponsored by Coca-Cola, and they wanted them to be red. So of course, if you pay, you can get them to be red for a few months. That sort of thing has been really useful. And recently, we also got into some sort of consulting to put it in a simplified way. The experience that we have accumulated through this project has allowed us to get into new things linked to waste. I'm skipping a little bit here, but we got this challenge for traceability of industrial waste, and we were able to win that challenge in collaboration with a software factory, a hardware provider, Sempre and Data Uruguay. That was a really big project, and that sets the standard for waste tracking in the whole country. So it really gave us an opportunity to put our hands where things are being cooked and really set standards that will eventually end up benefiting the project itself. We are also working throughout the open government initiative in Uruguay. We have a commitment from the local government of Montevideo, which is by far the biggest program in the country, to co-create the standard for data on recyclables. So basically what we have been doing will be officially adopted by the government, hopefully without many changes. And that will lead us, hopefully and almost 10 years later, to finally have a way to consume that data fully automatically, including updates, and cross my fingers, also send them updates automatically through an API or a web service or something like that. We have other projects on the pipeline working on residential waste, like actual garbage in this case, in the local government of Montevideo, and another one with the chamber of industry, which might also end up using us, this is like this consortium that we form with the data factory and the hardware provider, to create a tracking system for recyclables country-wide. So very excited about that. On the tech side, we are a bit better now. We're still using Ionic. Although I must confess, I hate mobile apps. They are very hard to maintain. So don't do them, basically. We're still using Angular, and we're using Rails now for our backend. And this has been not also very successful for this project itself, but it has turned into our standard stack. So we are now using Rails backends for every single project we have and an Angular front end. So this project wasn't only very important for what we aim to do related to recyclables, but it was a very important project for the organization as a whole. We ended up modeling a lot of how we work around this. And with an extra minute to spare, that's what I wanted to tell you. I hope you found it interesting. If you have any questions, of course, please do them. Good question, yeah, absolutely valid. Our best year was 2021, I think. Remember, Uruguay has 3 million people for context. We had 75,000 unique users, I think, which we are pretty happy with, honestly. But years are around 50,000. This is very, very, very linked to promotion. Launch years were the ones that we had more people, of course, would get pressed, et cetera. But also something that's very important. As I said, we are an NGO. We don't leave from ads on the app or anything like that. We don't have ads. We try to track as little as possible. So we designed this app to have the least interaction possible. Something that I'm also very proud about. You can actually open the mobile web, look at it because it locates you in a map, and close it. And that's useful enough because you can see where the points are. You can have zero clicks on the app. So we are not trying to get people either to stay or to come back. If you have learned what you know, that's fine with us. So we are not doing really an effort in that sense. What we do know is we did this survey back in 2020. People are very happy about what they get from the app, and that's the most valuable measure for us. They were able not only to learn how to recycle better or where to drop the recyclables and stuff like that, but also they used the app to teach other people how to do it. And that has been the greatest insight we got from that survey. Mobile-friendly, single-page web apps instead? Did they work? Basically, yeah, Responsive Web is the future. We just love Responsive Web. We are very keen on people who are currently hindering the development of progressive web apps to actually stop it for once and let people who have nice mobile webs to be in app stores. Because I have to admit that app stores are a thing, and people love to talk about apps. And actually, we have a very hard time convincing our partners not to mention the app. Like, don't tell them, download the app, just go to the web. Put on the web, then put the logo of the app, whatever. But still, the thing is, people do love apps, and they have this workflow of going into the app store and searching. So that's my hope, PWAs. OK, thank you. Thanks.