More than a hackathon - lessons learned from the first edition of Hacking Carrots Program.
Our first Hacking Carrots Hackathon was a blast! Thank you to all of our Participants, Mentors, Volunteers and Partners for teaming up with us to work for 48 hours on creating solutions for Sustainable Development Goals.
But after all emotions go down, and the winning team concentrates on their work to make their dream come true, what really matters is the social impact it brought. Hacking Carrots is not just a hackathon, but an IT educational program that connects advanced technologies with social entrepreneurship.
Hackathons are supposed to be a sort of boys-club, a space designed for hardcore non-stop programming.
Yet, we had 79 % tickets booked by female participants and 59 % of the attendees were women.
How did we achieve this?
Although our main educational focus is on teaching and upskilling in IT (programming, UX etc.), as we’re on the frontline of the technological revolution, we understand that what you code is equally important.
And one hackathon is not enough to change it.
That’s why we’ve planned a long-term program which during the next couple of years will focus on three aspects: educating IT community about the UN’s SDGs, upskilling programmers in advanced technologies and building prototypes of solutions.
During the first edition we conducted:
This strategy helped us to provide opportunities for true inclusion and to address two big challenges:
The Winners: building for global impact from day one
The winning team fundao created a prototype of a service, that based on blockchain technology, would connect beneficiaries, providers of services and donors directly:
The decision of the Jury was unanimous. Here are the factors that convinced the Members to grant the main award to this team:
The New Generation of socially-conscious developers
Inclusion and diversity are not achieved by promoting one underrepresented group in a given community. It’s about engaging all representatives of a society. That’s why we were very happy to welcome to the hackathon teams created by high school and university students – a new generation that learns from the very beginning how to connect technology and social impact. Among them were the winners of the second place and the special award for best Smart City project: Code Hussar who created a prototype of an app to crowdfound local projects (on the neighbourhood level).
Together for Sustainable Cities and more
One thing that surprised us most (and what a positive surprise it was!) was the strong representation of the teams that decided to take up the smart cities challenge. Apart from the winning team, other projects that were presented during pitching contest were:
We really loved how diverse all the projects were in the end and that each challenge was addressed by the participants:
Future-proof Education
Civic Tech
AI in Business
This event was a success thanks to the engagement of:
Our Volunteers
Thank You: Aleksandra Hermanowicz, Karolina Popławska, Klaudia Dec, Magdalena Komorowska, Magdalena Ruta and Sylwia Paczuska
Our Mentors
Thank You: Alicja Cessak, Arkadiusz Szczudło, Brygida Dzidek, Dominik Komar, Kamila Sidor, Karo Wysocka, Katarzyna Marczak, Krzysztof Wittels, Łukasz Król, Maria Połońska, Michał Kliś, Nikolay Pavlenko, Piotr Grabowski, Rudradeb Mitra, Ruslan Korniichuk and Sylwia Kobayashi
Our Jury
Thank You: Diana Koziarska, Kinga Barchoń, Małgorzata Ratajska-Grandin, Jerzy Brodzikowski, Łukasz Stefanik, Piotr Mieczkowski and Tadeusz Osowski
And our Partners
Geek Girls Carrots Team
From the left: Adelina Frydel (Project Manager), Małgorzata Ratajska-Grandin (CEO), Elizabeth Tishchenko (Junior Project Manager), Agata Piekut (Communication Manager)
