How We Do It
Hackathons are sessions for the rapid building of digital prototypes of new ideas. There are a few crucial elements that make this approach effective. Everything we do is to make engagement simple, fun and powerful for you, not least these events.
Mixing Up People
Bringing together unique new combinations of people with different backgrounds, skills and ideas is probably the most important factor for generating exploration of new propositions. We can create things far beyond what we can do alone.
The energy of these events, created by a positive blend of collaboration and competition, is exactly in line with how UN Influx seeks to improve the ability for the UN and public to work together - simple, fun and powerful.
Data
This is the raw material for generating new propositions. Information is available from many sources through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces - in case you were wondering) that basically allow interesting combinations of information to be mangled together in order to create valuable new information, products and services.
We are fortunate to have found Manfred & Steven from 3Scale who have built an API specifically to share UN data (https://www.undata-api.org/) but you're encouraged to work creatively with the many sources, from social media to geo-location and beyond.
Deadlines
By having a very short timeframe to work in helps to focus ideas into tangible, testable prototypes. The basence of deadlines otherwise perpetuates ideas that are poorly defined and float around, taking up time and space but without progressing. The deadline forces decisions and helps teams to focus on completing further cycles of build - test - learn which are required to break through layers of improvement often required for propositions to ripen sufficiently to thrive.