Mar 23, 2020
I Participated in the Largest Hackathon in History!
#WirVsVirus — 48 hours of hacking to fix COVID-19 problems.
Pragmatism and optimism are the best medicine for dire times. Last weekend the #WirVsVirusHack (we versus virus in German) provided a fantastic platform to put these at work. What started as a spontaneous idea by a couple of entrepreneurs, they have turned into the probably largest (remote) hackathon ever held. Approximately 43,000 people from Germany and around the world, from every walk of life, hacker, nerd, and average janes and joes signed up to hack the COVID-19-induced social and health crisis.
Fun facts first: The sheer number of participants trying to get access to the hackathons’ ressources crashed Slack, Devpost, and Airtable during the kick-off.
After having first heard about the event last Thursday from the CTO of my industry partner, I was invited to a colorful group of bright minds. A brief intro call later, we embarked on the two-day journey to help solve problems that arose due to COVID-19. In our case, mostly the closing of schools and lockdown scenarios and the consequences thereof.
The Problem
Pupils, teachers, students, and academics are staying home to prevent the spreading of COVID-19. Significant problems arise from this. Namely, younger students and teachers with less experience in digital schooling are confronted with organizational hurdles. Digital platforms for learning exist in abundant numbers. Still, they either perform insufficiently (e.g., they crash because of the sudden high demand) or digital tools are used in inefficient manners. Many of the affected people are willing to either get mentored or be a mentor for those in need. What we isolated as the dominating problem is the matchmaking between those brains that want to support and those brains that need the support: the .brain idea was born.
The Solution
We came up with the idea to create a straightforward, child-friendly application for mentoring matchmaking. The process of signing up and interacting should be as simple as possible.
A hackathon is an extremely dense sprint to come up with a prototype: We started with brainstorming a story, designed (brain-inspired) mockups, and shot some video for a demo. In the meantime, the techies began putting together the first snippets of code (in a unique Web 4.0 application you’ll undoubtedly hear from on another occasion).
Here are the deliverables we came up within a little less than 48 hours. I am incredibly thankful to have worked with such a brilliant and inspiring team. Thank you all!
The .brain Demo
.brain Ressources
The Devpost submission (in German)
The GitHub README (in English)
More insights from on my Twitter-account
Credits
Big shoutout to my teammates: Carolin Glaeser, Helena Wollmann, Karsten Kreh, Lorenz Meier, Lynn Fehlbaum, Marcel Donges, Max Emrich, Orlando Jähde, and Timo Morawitz.
