Michael A. Thom and Damethri George won the inaugural Junior Category.

"How might technology help monitor and protect Guyana's marine and coastal ecosystems while supporting sustainable development?" That was the question the Office of the Prime Minister's Industry and Innovation Unit put to us on 26 August. We had eight days. MAT Solutions won the inaugural Junior Category of Innovation Challenge 2026, run with SBM Offshore Guyana. Seven teams registered, three made it to judging, and Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret'd) Mark Phillips presented the trophy at the closing ceremony. We answered it with BrownBalance. You pick what you are building, tap a spot on the Region 3 coast, and it scores the site out of 100 against mangroves, drainage, shoreline, roads and the land already built on. Every deduction shows the distance that produced it. Put a second site beside the first and it tells you what improves and what gets worse. Seventy-one commits over those eight days, and the interface was rebuilt twice. The scoring never moved. All three versions score the same site 35 out of 100, which was the point. The rules were settled early, and everything after that was making them legible. The rule we would not bend: missing information does not mean safe. If a data layer fails to load, BrownBalance reports it as not assessed. It never turns missing evidence into a better score. With real land, real money and the environment involved, admitting what you do not know is safer than false certainty. What it is not: planning approval, an EPA decision, an environmental impact assessment, or engineering certification. The thresholds are ours, and we published every one of them. Built with Damethri George. Live at hackathon.matsolutions.gy #Guyana #InnovationChallenge2026 #CivicTech #SoftwareEngineering