Hackatons
A hackathon or an Apps challenge is an event where programmers, software engineers, graphics / interface designers and project managers brainstorm and collaborate intensively on software projects for duration of one day to a week. Some hackathons can also have hardware component to it. Several hackathons are primarily for educational and social purposes only, while in other cases the primary goal is to develop a working piece of software or tool. These can range from a specific programming language to sets of languages to solve particular problems.
Since its inception, the concept has brought together programmers in order to solve day to day problems (both commercial and civic) such as designing apps to monitor flows, or data parsing, scraping of water datasets, or Apps built using the Climate API during the World Bank’s Apps4Climate competition in 2012.
The Water Hackathon hosted at the World Bank was a forum for the creation of a network of typical partners in finding solutions to water-related development challenges and the adoption of such practices and challenges into World Bank projects. The broad category of tools developed or prototyped included crowd sourcing tools, data aggregators, mapping tools, games and mobile collection tools.
The private sector has held similar hackathons for dedicated apps, sometimes not through a dedicated hackathon but through a forum or conference on a particular topic. Google has organized working groups and meetings with several partners to develop their products over the years, such as Earth Engine, Search Engine algorithms, AdSense etc. Facebook and Microsoft have similarly held bug-finding competitions (both in person and virtual) to improve their products, where hundreds of hackers or developers have contributed to the Quality Assurance process in their software suite of products. NGOs and research entities have also organized similar competitions in the past, such as IDHACK 2016 organized by Harvard Developers for Development, and the 4th International Development Hackathon organized by the MIT Global Poverty Initiative in February, 2016.
Prize winners and top performers from recent hackathons (PHOTO GALLERY) Food Price Tracker: An app that tracks food prices with Twitter (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jepworks.foodtracker&hl=en)
Taarifa: A tool enabling citizens to report water and sanitation infrastructure problems via SMS and the Web (http://dashboard.taarifa.org/#/dashboard)