Language Hackathon 2017 : breaking barriers

The philosophy of the Impact Hub Brno is to encourage members to cooperate instead of competing. This can have enormous positive effects for the future — it’s from such a synergy between Kiwi.com and Moravia IT that idea of a language hackathon was born.

I first met the guys from Moravia IT a year ago when they organised an international event for their employees at the Impact Hub Brno. I was stunned by the energy and friendliness of them all. I knew that we’d cooperate again in future because what can be better than working with motivated, energetic people who are open to trying new things?

A few months later, we met again and discussed the idea of organising a hackathon. They had noticed that there were plenty of hackathons going on in Brno but they’d never held their own. I suggested involving another partner and the first company that came to mind was Kiwi.com. I know a lot of people working there and I was sure that they’d welcome the idea.

Sure enough, the Language Hackathon 2017 was conceived and it’s happening in the middle of October.

The hackathon will be centred around machine translation, natural language processing, machine learning and chatbots. The idea is to cover groundbreaking and disruptive new technologies that help drive multilingual content and break language barriers.

What do we all have in common?

It would be rare to find two companies in the world with nothing in common. The key to successful cooperation is to find a common interest. In the case of Moravia IT and Kiwi.com, we found out that they both work with languages — both foreign and programming.

We may work differently but our strength is that we have similar missions and goals — we offer support to a wide range of IT experts.

Now, we’re all working together to create something new. The Language Hackathon will be amazing but what excites me even more is that we’ve inspired people to cooperate and spread their ideas in their working and personal lives as well.

See you at the Impact Hub Brno on October 13 at 19:00 for the best hackathon of the autumn!

Matúš is the Event Manager at Impact Hub Brno — an inspirational co-working space and venue for networking events. It’s part of the Impact Hub Network which has more than 100 locations worldwide.