Inviting geospatial programmers, ecologists, water-security researchers, and community practitioners to build open-source solutions, analyses, and tools using the CoRE Stack datasets and APIs to improve socio-ecological resilience and support community-led landscape action.
Read more about the challenge, join in weekly community calls, and view recordings and blogs of interesting use-cases from earlier calls.
The CoRE Stack (Commoning for Resilience and Equality) is a community-based digital public infrastructure of pre-computed geospatial datasets, analytic pipelines, and user-facing tools that help rural communities, researchers, and practitioners understand and act on socio-ecological challenges. The data spans novel geospatial layers on changes over the years in cropping intensity, water-table levels, health of waterbodies, forests and plantations, and welfare fund allocation, among others, sourced from multiple contributors or built using open ML models operating on satellite data. Rich analytics are computed on this data to build diverse social-ecological indicators through scientifically validated monitoring and modelling methodologies and algorithms.
What the CoRE stack simplifies for researchers and developers is its novel approach to geospatial programming where it provides ready-to-use pre-computed data of various landscape entities - micro-watersheds, waterbodies, forests, agroforestry plantations - organized in nested and connected spatial units, and populated with tons of datapoints about these entities to build a comprehensive place-based social-ecological understanding.
This challenge asks teams to use the CoRE Stack APIs and datasets to: 1) answer scientific or operational questions about landscapes; 2) build meaningful additions or integrations for the stack; and 3) deliver open-source code, reproducible notebooks, and demonstrations that can be adopted by practitioners or integrated into the CoRE stack.
Participants are encouraged to form interdisciplinary teams that combine domain expertise (ecology, hydrology, social science) with geospatial programming and UX/dev skills.
Timeline & milestones
- Launch: Nov 22, 2025
- Weekly developer community calls / mentorship: Fridays, 3-4pm
- Submission deadline: Jan 15, 2026
- Shortlist & demos: Jan 31, 2026
- Winners announced & prize distribution: Feb 15, 2026
Prizes
- Cash prizes of Rs 10,000 for exciting solutions and merch from FOSS United for all participants.
- Mentorship sessions with domain experts in the CoRE stack network for top finalists.
- Opportunities to integrate winning work into the CoRE Stack ecosystem and technical support for adoption.
Join the CoRE stack developer community Googlegroup and Discord channel to contribute and to get clarifications, and participate in weekly community calls on Fridays 3-4pm IST.