My Participation at the #wirVsVirus Hackathon

The main subject of 2020 is the global Covid-19 pandemic. Estonia organized a big hackathon. It brought together creative nerds, techies and interdisciplinary experts. Soon after a German initiative organized the #wirVsVirus Hackathon. The team estimated round about 1000 participants would show up (virtually). However, the estimate was wrong.

My participation in the hackathon

I was one of those participants. I worked together with 14 other people on a small app. The idea is simple: generate tickets (passes) for going out during a general lockdown. We had three main users: Marie, Thomas and Janosch. Marie works at a pharmacy, Thomas wants to buy some medicine and Janosch is the police officer. He must control the lockdown and make sure nobody is out, if not necessary.

Our app is called SafeTicket because we protect the user’s data and generate tickets to go out. The police can control the tickets easily with a QR-Code and in a more sophisticated version, the system could predict where police is needed (due to high ticket concentration in a certain region).

The purpose matters

My 48 hours with this unknown team were great! The experience was really eyes opening. So many people have amazing skills and want to help. Suddenly, working together across the whole country is possible. Suddenly, the common goal is more important than Netflix. People came together (on Zoom and Slack) and were creative. It was a real swarm experience.

Thus, I really recommend it to anyone! No matter what skill you have, it is possible to bring yourself into the action. Stay open minded, stay positive and work towards a common goal. Hopefully, we will be able to reproduce this amazing experience next time without the crisis.

By the way, our app was chosen for the follow up program called “Solution Enabler”. You can follow our progress on this site:

https://www.safeticketapp.de/de/


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