# LinkedIn post: Innovation Challenge 2026

## Caption

"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

---

## Image order

Upload the `post/` folder. The files are numbered in post order, so selecting all six
gives you the right sequence.

| # | File | What it shows |
|---|------|---------------|
| 1 | `post/1-trophy-presentation-pm-phillips.jpg` | PM Mark Phillips presenting the trophy. The lead image. |
| 2 | `post/2-statement-of-problem.jpg` | The official Statement of Problem, and the shape of the competition. |
| 3 | `post/3-same-rules-three-looks.jpg` | The interface at three commits, all scoring the same site 35. |
| 4 | `post/4-seventy-one-commits.jpg` | Every commit by day, and a few of the messages. |
| 5 | `post/5-trophy-raised.jpg` | Walking out with the trophy raised, golden hour. |
| 6 | `post/6-trophy-plaque.jpg` | The plaque: Junior Innovators Champions. |

The run is moment, problem, work, effort, portrait, proof. Image 1 renders largest in the
feed, so it does most of the work.

**Every photograph carries the same grade**, so they read as one set rather than several
phones on several days: matched white balance, one warm tint, lifted midtones so skin does
not go dark, and a light film grain added at final resolution. Nothing stylised, no filter
look. The grain is deliberately faint, visible as texture rather than noise. The three cards were already a matched set on the
BrownBalance palette.

**Image 1 is cropped tight on purpose.** The wide frame put a busy photo collage down the
left and a blown-out window on the right, with the two of them small in the middle. The
tight crop fills it with the handshake, the trophy and both faces, and lands at 4:5, which
is the aspect LinkedIn gives the most feed height. The wide version is in `extras/` if you
ever want the banner in shot.

### extras/

Four more that did not make the six. Add any of them as a seventh if you want the longer
version, or keep them back for a follow-up post.

- `trophy-presentation-wide.jpg` — the presentation shot framed wide, with the Office of the Prime Minister banner visible. Same frame as image 1, more room.
- `contributions-year.jpg` — the GitHub contribution graph, cropped to the graph.
- `brownbalance-presentation.jpg` — the rule on screen during the presentation.
- `innovation-challenge-cohort.jpg` — the full cohort, official photograph.
- `team-mat-solutions.jpg` — casual team shot, if you want to tag Damethri.

---

## Where every claim comes from

**Statement of Problem**, verbatim, from the Industry and Innovation Unit email of 27 August 2026:
> STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: How might technology help monitor and protect Guyana's marine and coastal ecosystems while supporting sustainable development?

**Seven teams, three finalists, presentation format**, from the Industry and Innovation Unit email of 1 September 2026:
> Seven teams registered; however, only three teams remain to compete. [...] You have 12-15 minutes to present, followed by a 5-minute Q&A with the judges.

**The result**, from the Industry and Innovation Unit Facebook post of 6 September 2026:
> I TECH won the Senior Category, followed by LUDGE TECH and G STACK. MATT Solutions won the inaugural Junior Category, followed by Code Lunima and Mars.

Note the official post spells it "MATT Solutions". That is a typo on their side.

**The closing ceremony and the trophy**, from the Office of the Prime Minister Facebook post of 6 September 2026, which places the ceremony at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre. The photographs of the handover are in a boardroom rather than a hall, so the caption does not name a venue.

**Commit numbers** are `git log` on the product repository: 71 commits, 26 August to 2 September, 76 files, 12,128 insertions, two authors. The presentation suite adds 20 more, for 91 across the two repositories.

**The three interface stages** are real captures at real commits, documented in `assets/history/HISTORY.md` in the presentation suite. All three score 6.95235, -58.36280 at 35 out of 100.

**Contribution graph** is the public profile at github.com/Solarthis, captured 7 September 2026.

Product wording is taken from the BrownBalance README so nothing overstates what the tool does.

---

## One thing still open

**The mark scheme is not here.** There is no judging rubric or scoring criteria anywhere in your email from the Industry and Innovation Unit. The five emails they sent cover registration, the Zoom opening, the Statement of Problem, the judging logistics and the closing ceremony. If they handed out criteria it was in the 26 August Zoom session or on paper. Send a photo or a file and it goes straight into the set.

The GitHub card stays cropped to the contribution graph, confirmed. Your full profile page pins `codex-massa` and `opencode-massa`, whose descriptions name Codex and Claude Code, and putting that on the same screen as a BrownBalance write-up would undo the rule. The crop keeps the number without the problem.
