Idea Generation Through Hackathon Event in Emergencies and Disasters, with Emphasis on Managing Flash Flood Disaster

Abstract

Objective: This study was intended to demonstrate the applicability of the hackathon in idea generation for managing emergencies and disasters with a particular focus on flash floods. Methods: A 4-day hackathon event was held, having 60 students, 9 mentors and 6 judges gathered to explore different ideas, and to solve problems of Iran flooding from mid-March to April, 2019. Of these, 10 teams with 6 students were accordingly formed to brainstorm and discuss the idea, while 9 mentors offered advice and guided them to manage their ideas. Then, all teams focused on designing their business models. Finally, the hackathon teams finalized their lean canvas and presented their ideas to the judging panel and the other participants. Results: A total of 10 ideas were presented, and based on the knowledge and experience of the judges, 3 ideas that were more practical and useful were selected. Conclusions: As participants in a hackathon identify and present real-world problems, while ensuring that the prototype solutions address the end-user’s needs, it could be used to drive innovation, generate ideas, promote change in emergencies and disasters, and can increase our preparedness for future events. It helps us to develop tools and applications to better respond to these events.

Designathons in health research: a global systematic review

“…We retrieved 127 publications from additional searches (ie, citation searching and the complementary open call), with a further 11 publications included in this review. In total, we included 42 studies in this review,7 8 18–57 with 39 studies (93%) focusing on developing social innovations 7 8 18–20 22–42 44–53 55–57. The PRISMA flowchart is presented in online supplemental figure 1.…”

“…In total, 41 studies (98%) reported the number of designathon participants 7 8 18–53 55–57. The median number of individuals participating in designathons was 49 (IQR 34–90, range 6–434), and the median number of teams was 8 (IQR 5–14.5, range 2–40).…”

“…The median number of individuals participating in designathons was 49 (IQR 34–90, range 6–434), and the median number of teams was 8 (IQR 5–14.5, range 2–40). In total, 30 studies (71%) included participants who were a mixture of health and non-health professionals 7 19–22 24 26 28–42 44 47 50–54 57. In total, 37 studies (88%) reported the duration of the intensive collaboration part, ranging from 3 hours to 7 days (online supplemental table 3).…”

“…In total, 37 studies (88%) reported the duration of the intensive collaboration part, ranging from 3 hours to 7 days (online supplemental table 3). 7 8 18 21–24 26–29 31–53 55–57…”

Crowdsourcing Team Formation With Worker-Centered Modeling

“…Even though hackathons have originated from the software development community (e.g., cybersecurity, game jams, opensource development, and operating systems) (Nolte et al, 2018), they are increasingly popular in other domains such as crowdsourcing innovation (Temiz, 2021;Wang et al, 2021). Further, as society faces progressively more global challenges, the help of citizens-and more broadly crowds-is also being used to find solutions to universal problems such as carbon emissions, household waste, and deforestation through collective idea generation (Monsef et al, 2021).…”