No wonder the COVID-19 impacted us all, globally, a lifetime experience. So was the response that some 20,000 individuals, orchestrated under the umbrella of the European Union, the weekend of April 24th to 26th.
I volunteered as a Mentor and Team Coordinator to facilitate the event and help teams deliver their best. But, maybe you are wondering, What is a hackathon? A hackathon, hacking marathon, is an event of accelerated development, teams get together to work on specific challenges aiming to deliver innovative solutions, often in the form of software or hardware prototypes. In this case, the theme was fighting the effects of the coronavirus crisis.
A number of challenges were announced, in five major categories and participants invited to form teams to propose solutions.
Team forming was the first challenge in itself, few teams came already formed, but with so many talented people from European countries and abroad, it was coordinated through DevPost and Slack platforms.
Once a team was formed they started to work on solutions to solve one of the topics. I was in charge of the “Stay Close to your customers” challenge within the Business Continuity Domain. The challenge attracted over 40 teams, so we split it to a couple of Team Coordinators.
Very quickly, brilliant ideas were put forward. From managing queues virtually – so you don’t need to stay in line for your groceries, to community delivery services. Arranging for shopping carts to small business with little technical know-how, helping artisans sell-out, or understanding to small business their break-even point under the new reality.
A hackathon is not a brainstorm, i.e. it is not about ideas; it is about ideas and implementations, that is where the fun begins. Building MVPs, Minimum Viable Products, or mock ups to test functionalities. It was great to refresh on many technologies to rapidly prototyping solutions—a separate post on that in a few days.
The mentors came in to review whether the project made sense, the business case was there, the solution scales up appropriately, managing legal aspects like privacy, working across borders, porting the solution to different scenarios.
- Health & Life
- Protective equipment
- Ventilators/respirators
- Protection of medical personnel
- Real time communication & prevention
- Cheap rapid tests
- Lack of skilled caregivers
- Research
- Other
- Business continuity
- Efficient team work
- New and resilient business models
- Value chains & logistics
- Protecting employees
- Demonstrate purpose
- Stay close to your customers
- Other
- Social & political cohesion
- Protection of isolated & risk groups
- Mitigating fake news spreading
- Support arts & entertainment
- Fight against crime
- Protection of citizens & democracy
- Developing people-driven economies
- Other
- Remote working and education
- E-Learning methods & tools
- Efficient remote working
- Family life during remote working & education
- Primary and secondary school specific challenges
- University specific challenges
- Students’ challenges
- Other
- Digital finance
- Support identification of financial shortfalls
- Speed-up access to financial support
- Speed-up distribution of financial support
- Availability of emergency health insurance
- Enable crowd to help financially
- Support for digitally excluded
- Other
jaume ayerbe 