MishMash Online Hackathon — A look back

MishMash.

The name conjures up an image of a mixture or a potpourri.

In our context, it was the name of a hackathon — India’s largest online diversity hackathon, and one of our biggest initiatives to date.

Billed as a “Hack from Home” hackathon, the focus was to give developers, regardless of their technical background, gender, orientation, skill sets or viewpoints a chance to try their hand at product building.

Developers across India (in teams or solo) worked on interesting projects and submitted them online. We encouraged them to work in teams that were as diverse as possible (MishMash, anyone?). After all, having different viewpoints helps in a hackathon situation, does it not?

In the end, the result showed that encouraging diversity did indeed result in unique and outstanding solutions.

Skip ahead to the “Who were the winners?” section to get a feel for the ideas on display.

But how did the hackathon come about? Who were the sponsors? What happened? How did it work? Who were the winners? What were the …

So many questions …

Let’s tackle each of them one by one …

Here’s the complete and detailed story of what happened during MishMash. But first, let’s look at why MishMash was such a special hackathon.

What made it so special?

Firstly, as we said, it gave everyone a chance to participate. No shortlisting based on background; only ideas were important!

Secondly, MishMash took place against the backdrop of COVID-19. As such, developers were faced with a unique set of circumstances and challenges.

And it was also one of our largest initiatives to date. We had 6 sponsors involved: Microsoft, Unity, Unilever, Gojek, Rocketium & the Jharkhand State Government.

Each sponsor had their own set of requirements as to what they wanted to see in a solution. For example, Rocketium and the Jharkhand State Government wanted to see ideas centered around bringing about tech solutions to the pandemic.

There were even job opportunities! Unilever, our gold sponsor, was on the lookout for developers to join their team.

In addition to our sponsors, we had 3 community partners: v-shesh, Azure Tech Community and Women Who Code. Each community partner helped us in our outreach to a diverse cast of developers.

To give you an idea of the diversity of registrants, here’s a sneak peek at some of the numbers: 1344 female developers, 27 developers registered who were PWDs (Persons With Disabilities), 293 developers registered with over 10 years’ experience, etc. Find out more in the section “Who were the participants?”

As you can see, there was a diversity in participants, registrants, sponsors and the community partners as well!

How did the hackathon work?

The hackathon was split into several phases. These were:

• The Registration Phase: Participants registered on the platform in teams of 1 to 4 members. We encouraged them to form a diverse team as possible
• The Idea Submission Phase: Once registered, participants selected a theme from among six themes. Some themes were sponsored individually by the sponsors we talked about before. After participants selected a theme, they brainstormed and worked on an idea brief. They submitted their idea brief on the Skillenza platform
• The Product Submission Phase (Main Online Phase of the Hackathon): Participants were shortlisted based solely on their idea and invited to take part in the main online phase of the hackathon. Participants were encouraged to build their products on Microsoft Azure. Azure passes were provided to all the teams to build products and bring out their innovative ideas to life and solve various problems from all the themes
• The Online Demo: We shortlisted and invited the top 10 teams from the product submission phase to present their projects over a 10-minute online call in front of a panel of qualified judges. The final winners of the hackathon were selected based on the outcome of this final presentation. The winners were announced over emails sent out to all participants of MishMash, as well as our social media channels (including this blog post!).

The teams selected for the online hackathon phase were invited to join Slack channels where mentors guided them. You can find the mentor details by heading on over to the MishMash hackathon page and clicking on the “mentors” tab.

The timelines for each phase are shown in the diagram below:

What were the themes?

MishMash had 6 themes.

The themes were:

Here’s a brief overview of each theme and the requirements for each:

• Deep Tech/Machine Learning: This theme was sponsored by Unilever and had 3 problem statements. Participants had to choose to work on any one of the problem statements. Based on their performance, Unilever would shortlist them for hiring purposes. (At the time of writing this blog post, Unilever has still not yet announced the winners of this part of the hackathon)
• EdTech: Participants were encouraged to work on solutions for online education. This is especially relevant today because of the circumstances brought about the COVID-19 pandemic
• Fintech: Participants could innovate in any domain of Fintech. Suggestions included innovation in these areas: B2B Lending, Payments, RegStack, Insurance, Peer2Peer Lending, Peer2Peer payments, eKYC and so on
• Mobility: Here the requirement was to see innovation in the field of travel, be it reimagining self-driving cars, micro-mobility in large confined spaces, and hyperloops
• AR/VR/XR: This was sponsored by Unity and was divided into subcategories: epidemic, urban, remake. Those participants who selected this theme to work on had to use the Unity platform along with Azure services
• Social Impact: This theme was sponsored by Rocketium and the Jharkhand State Government. The idea behind this was to come up with solutions for the Jharkhand State Government to the problems brought about by the coronavirus

If you want detailed information about each theme, you can find them at the MishMash registration page. Just click on the themes tab!

Let’s now briefly go over the participants’ demographics.

Who were the participants?

The participants of the hackathon came from a wide variety of backgrounds and demographics. disciplines. Here’s the breakdown of the numbers:

Let’s now go over what happened during the demo phase.

What went down during the demo?

There’s an old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” If you allow us the liberty, let’s coin a phrase: “A video is worth a thousand pictures.” So, instead of us writing a million words to describe what happened during the demo, we’ve got a video for you to go over!

While the demo was going on, Twitter was all abuzz. Here’s a small sample:

Quite a tweetstorm indeed!

Who were the winners?

Judging who won was quite hard! Because the quality was so great. Eventually, the judges decided to confer honors on the following teams:

• 1st Place: smash — The members of this team were Sumanth Reddy and Priya M, and they won the top prize of INR 200,000. They worked on the Edtech theme. They built a web browser extension that automatically generated a quiz for videos on YouTube and other EdTech websites using NLP and AI. This would help test the user’s understanding by quizzing themselves soon after watching the video
• 2nd Place: Meraki (Kshitija Surange and Utsav Mishra) won a total of INR 125,000. They worked on the theme of mobility and came up with a route optimization and visualization solution for sales vehicles
• 3rd Place (tied): LazarusNetwork (Shachindra Kumar, Anish Mishra, Gaurav Kumar, Meit Maheshwari) and Maverick (Dhruv Rathi) tied for 3rd place and split the prize of INR 75,000 between them. LazurusNetwork attempted to solve the security issues caused by people working from home. Maverick worked on the AV/VR/XR theme and built interactive 3D Unity assets where these 3D images are creating from 2D images using Deep Learning
• Honorable Mention: Argonauts (Single-member team — Pridhvi Meduri). Built a virtual reality-based platform to increase student engagement. The idea was to provide novel experiences for students studying online

In addition, the top 25 teams of the hackathon won swag packs for their participation. The announcement of winner details was made either via email and/or through our social media platforms.

Also, there were special prizes for teams who solved the problem statements sponsored by Unilever. At the time of writing this post, the winners of these special prizes have not yet been announced.

What were the lessons learned?

Our CEO, Subhendu Panigrahi, is fond of quoting Anton Ego, the famous food critic from the movie Ratatouille, who says “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*”.

MishMash was a perfect indicator of this sentiment.

Teams came up with so many fantastic and unique ideas during the course of the hackathon in spite of the fact that the hack was conducted during one of the greatest crises faced during our lifetimes. Amazing!

We should also mention that a collaborative effort was needed to bring out the best solutions. After all, the success of the hackathon depended on the combined efforts of several stakeholders. From the organizers to the sponsors, community partners to participants, mentors to judges — everyone played key roles!

Interested in participating in online hackathons and challenges? Head on over to our Skillenza website and select one that interests you! Also, if you want to conduct a hackathon of our own, do reach out to us on our Enterprise page and we’ll get back to you asap.