Organised within the scope of the H2020 CUTLER project, the #WaterFrontHack Global Online Hackathon is an opportunity for developers, policy and domain experts around the world to come together and address the challenges of sustainable development in coastal urban areas.
For more information please visit: https://www.cutler-h2020.eu/hackathon/
Prizes
The Evaluation Committee will assign scores for the different criteria to the solution developed by each team. The three teams with the greatest average score will be given awards in the form of ICT equipment of their own choosing. More specifically, there will be three prizes:
1st Place: 3,000 EUR
2nd Place 1,500 EUR
3rd Place: 500 EUR
The top 5 projects will be featured on our website and social media.
Project Challenge and Tracks
The overall objective of the hackathon is to create functioning software solutions, namely open-source interactive dashboards, that will help policymakers better understand information pertaining to the economic, social, and environmental impact of policies on urban areas surrounded by a large body of water.
Participants are strongly encouraged to address problems that fit within one or more of the following tracks. We also welcome projects that target issues that may fall beyond the scope of these tracks given that they are solving a validated end-user need:
- Water-related policies, e.g water-based tourism, activities in the waterfront, flood protection management, water-related recreational activities, coastal management, tourism and gig economy in waterfront cities.
- Collecting, sharing and analysing heterogeneous data from social, economic, and environmental sources (e.g. citizen engagement and crowdsourcing citizen science platforms, social media, big data repositories, or National Statistical Offices)
- Novel interactive big data visualizations and dashboards with open source tools (e.g. Kibana) that can enable policy-makers to gain data-driven insights and help improve decision-making in urban coastal fronts.
- End-to-end data pipelines using on-premise or cloud-based data platforms using established technology stacks (e.g. ELK, Hadoop).
- Whenever possible, solutions should take into account algorithmic bias and Machine Learning fairness as to alleviate existing socio-economic exclusion and inequalities that prevent individuals and groups from fully participating in the economic, social, and decision-making process of their community.
- Other (Hacker’s Choice)
Solutions should address the needs of one or more of the following end-users and stakeholders:
- Policymakers: Municipality employees making decisions about urban development and planning.
- Researchers: With a focus on Big data analytics, Smart Cities, Data-driven policy-making, decision support systems.
- Citizens: Individual citizens and/or civil society groups interested in participating in local decision making
- Vendors: Industry and SMEs developing smart city applications and services for local governments.
- Small businesses: Local businesses benefiting from smart city solutions and big data availability.
Event Timeline
| Registration | June 1st 2020 — Registration Opens! |
| Registration for hackers and mentors is open. | |
| First Draft Submission | July 15th 2020— Initial idea Submission Deadline. |
| Submit the first draft of your project to the registration platform. Don’t worry if you’ve missed the June 1st deadline, you have 30 days to find teammates, mentors and fine-tune your project idea. Make sure to join the Slack Workspace to find mentors and teammates. | |
| Build Sprint starts | Sep 1st 2020: Register your team along with a description of your project and start building! |
| You still have time to edit your project description and submit all the necessary material for the final evaluation. | |
| Final Submission | October 18th 2020, 23:59 CET. After this date, all forms will be locked and changes will not be saved. |
| Judging & evaluation | October 18th – October 23th 2020 |
| Announcement of Results | October 23rd 2020 14:00 CET |
How to Participate
| Step | Action | Content |
| #1 | Registration | Register on our website and provide a summary of your solution, how it works, geographical scope, and the technology stack used. Opt-in to receive important info and email updates from the organisers. |
| #2 | Join Slack Workspace | Join the Slack Workspace: Check out different channels, find #mentors and introduce yourself at the #hackers channel! |
| #3 | Recruit teammates | If you have applied individually, you can find teammates in the #find-teammates Slack channel. |
| #4 | Register your team | Register your team and indicate if you are looking for teammates or mentors. |
| #5 | Build sprint starts | You can always find mentors and new teammates in the Slack Workspace |
| #6 | Submit! | Submit your project (video & code) deadline: October 18th 2020, 23:59 CET |
| #7 | Results | Results will be streamed: October 23th 2020 14:00 CET |
Eligibility
- Any individual over 18 years old can participate.
- Teams of up to 5 are welcome to sign up as a group.
- Partial teams and/or individuals are welcome to join and can find teammates on our slack channel or the participant portal.
- We encourage participants to seek teammates with diverse skills and domain knowledge related to the challenge tracks of the hackathon.
- Projects that did not include a pitch video or access to a code repo will not be evaluated.
- You are welcome to submit as many projects as you want.
Judging Criteria
- Is the project ready-to-deploy and put into operation today?
- Does the project address one or more of the challenge tracks? Does the project solve a real problem, and does it meet a clearly established user need? Does the developed solution include data visualisation dashboards with an interactive mode?
- Do the developed dashboards provide a good and intuitive user experience?
- How many people/organisations would potentially benefit from the solution?
- Does the solution address privacy, ethics, and accessibility issues?
- Is the code in the public domain, well documented, and with instructions to ensure others can build upon the work done?
Rules
- All submissions must include a link to a demonstration video uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo. The demo video should:
- be less than 5 minutes in length and in English.
- induce footage that clearly demonstrates and walks through the developed solution.
- be easily understood by both technical and non-technical audiences.
- All submissions are strongly encouraged to include a link to code at Github or other repositories. Any code used/reused in the project submission page must adhere to the license terms under which it was originally written.
- All submissions are strongly encouraged to include a link to their live dashboard.
- The maximum number of team members in one team is five, and the minimum is one. The leader of each of the top 3 winning teams will define in consultation with their teammates the ICT equipment they wish to receive as their prize.
- We require teams to use open source technology stack and programming languages that are commonly used and easy to scale.
- All teams should submit a link to their code repository. We also encourage you to submit high quality and well-documented code.
- All teams should submit a 2 minutes (maximum) pitch video in English. The final solution and the data visualisation dashboards can be any language.
- Intellectual property rights will remain in with the maker, but we encourage open source solutions.
Mentors
TBC
Hosting organisations
Center for Ubiquitous Computing
Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
University of Oulu
Finland
Contact: Panos Kostakos (panos.kostakos@oulu.fi)
Information Technologies Institute
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas
Greece