World's first global hackathon
Over at koding.com they are running a global hackathon for the weekend of 6/7 December. It is an exciting project, with people participating all over the world.
The idea is for teams of up to 5 to work on projects along the following 5 themes:
- Problems facing our planet, explained using interactive data visualization. (e.g. climate change, earthquakes, food/water waste, etc.)
- Introducing software development to a beginner (games!)
- No one reads the fine print (ie TOS, EULA, legal documents) anymore yet every site has them. Devise a creative/interactive solution.
- HTML5 games that are educational and learning oriented. (multiplayer preferred)
- Challenges associated with real time communication and translation (Star Trek universal translator anyone?)
There are some great themes there, many of them relate directly to Bermuda. For example, maybe we could build a simple hurricane model, using data from the recent storms to allow people to explore the impact of global warming on Bermuda.
Meanwhile, I have been working on this 80 days project. Progress is proving difficult due to the amount of wonderful stuff there is out there that can be used in the project.
I am hoping to be able to use the hackathon to learn a couple more tools and to start making real progress on 80 days.
It would also be interesting to try and work with hackers on other small islands. One challenge here in Bermuda is, at least for now, our numbers are small. Other small islands have similary issues.
It would be good if we could perhaps work with people at the Lanzarote hackbase.
From a personal point of view, I also have some contacts in Ireland, so maybe we could stretch the definition of small a little to include Ireland too.
Then there are the Azores and the Caribbean.
Theme 5 is all about translation. It would be cool if we could make our site multi-lingual: English, Portuguese, Bermudian slang etc, etc.
One suggestion is to actually work towards having another hackathon event in the near future, a Small Island Hackathon. Is there any interest in using the global hackathon as an opportunity to build a site for a small island event. Perhaps we could have it coincide with Bermuda Race Weekend January 16-18th 2015.