Hackathons: It’s about innovation.
During the last six months members of R/GA’s Buenos Aires (BA) office have participated in a number of hackathons. Hackathons are no longer the geeky playground of full time techies. The best hackathons unite people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to focus participants on interesting, rewarding, and unique problems. This has lead to events like:
The BA team has primarily participated in hackathons created by organizations, universities, or civic institutions looking for innovative solutions to difficult societal problems. These hackathons are exceptionally rewarding because they help raise awareness just by organizing a team and showing up.
Results
Our recent hackathon submissions include the following projects:
MapArt @ BA Hackathon
Platform for Urban Art that helps City Hall collect, sort and promote all the art pieces that are on the streets of Buenos Aires.
The platform has 3 major pieces: A Collector app to let art explores to collect information, an admin site to curate information, and a Mobile Map so tourists can find art on the streets of BA.
Hipo @ Hackathon MDQ
This app helps tourist discover activities in Mar Del Plata – one of Argentina’s most popular beach cities – according the weather, their interestes, and what events are trending in the city.
Missing-IO @ Hackathon Litoral
Missing-IO is a platform that exposes an API for data about missing persons cases. An integration with Twitter Cards, Facebook Open Graph and its own banner system allows people to directly share or tweet cases.
What’s next?
Hackathons are focused innovation within time constraints and rely on great thinking combined with reliable data.
But the most important aspect will always be great people. The right mix of talent can make a hackathons the perfect environment for innovation. We still have much to learn from how hackathons can drive innovation in our society and our workplaces. Who knows what can emerge from the next hackathon ?