In the approaching spring, the Active Citizens Hackathons will be held again. In April and May 2024, we will invite you again to take part in the events where the service design method is used to find solutions to specific challenges in your local communities.
Two hackathons will be held this year:
- The first event will take place on 12-13 April 2024 in Kraków and will be dedicated to topics related to working with and for young people (the recruitment will start on 28 February). The event will be implemented in cooperation with the Civis Polonus Foundation.
- The second hackathon will take place on 17-18 May 2024 in Gdynia and deal with topics related to working with and for people with migration and refugee experience (the recruitment will start in April). The event will be implemented implemented in partnership with the IRSE Foundation.
What are Active Citizens Hackathons
We turn programmers into activists
Hackathon is an event whose name comes from a combination of English words ‘hacking’ and ‘marathon’. It is a simple meeting where a problem is posed for programmers and representatives of related professions to solve. Instead of programmers, we invite you – the activists – to take part in the Active Citizens hackathons.
Knowledge and ideas and expert support
During the hackathons, you will use the knowledge and experience you have accumulated in your organisation, but also from the knowledge of the experts we will invite to each event. They will be people who are familiar with the topic on which the meeting will be devoted; there will also be people familiar with the methodology of service design. They will be the ones to guide the process and support you at every stage: from the work of clarifying the design problem to the presentation of solutions. The knowledge and experience of others attending the event will also be an invaluable resource for you.
Deadline: 12 hours – so much and so much only
There will be limited time to work during the event. You will only have 12 hours, but also the comfort of focusing one hundred per cent of your attention on finding solutions. Both of these features of a hackathon are good fuel for creativity. When was the last time you had so much time to generate ideas and find solutions, without being preoccupied with current and urgent matters? Well, that’s right. We guess that, like us, you may not even remember when it was.
“I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving. This is counterintuitive, because complaining about deadlines is a near-universal pastime. When I worked with the amazing sculptor Ira Keeler on the space shuttle for Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, Keeler was always proclaiming, ‘With a couple more weeks, this could be a nice model.’ We’re conditioned to believe that the deadline is working against us. But I’m not so sure.”
Adam Savage, “Under The Gun”.
How to apply
On the first day of recruitment we will provide a short online form. In it, we will ask you to describe the problem for which you want to seek a solution within 12 hours and why you want to tackle it. We will invite approximately 10 teams of three people to participate. The most interesting and accurately described challenges will be selected.
What will happen
A week before each hackathon, we will invite the selected teams to a meeting during which we will tell you how to prepare for the event, from the content and logistical side. Each hackathon will last two days and consist of several parts (including defining needs – defining audiences – defining value propositions – generating ideas – communication), which will be conducted according to the service design methodology. Each part will be preceded by a short introduction and instructions for participants. During and between sessions, you will have an opportunity to lead discussions between the teams and consult the way and results of your work with experts. You will present the solutions developed during the hackathon during the concluding session (pitching).
Voting and selection criteria
When selecting the best ideas, we will take into account, among other things: the relevance of the solution to the problem formulated at the input or the possibility (probability) of tackling the challenge you identified, the creativity and/or innovation of the solution, the benefits for the target group and the local environment, the possibility of implementing the solution within the organisation’s activities. The best ideas will be selected by the votes of the people participating and the expert people advising the teams during the event. And the teams that have developed the best solutions will receive prizes.
How to prepare
Before each hackathon, two introductory webinars will be held (open to anyone interested in taking part).
We also encourage you to watch recordings of three webinars on service design methodologies and tools, which are available in our “Library“. You will learn how to design services – proposals for activities that are attractive to the recipients and that can become the basis for new projects..
