#PragueHacks, the Pre-event, in Tweets and Pics

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What is #Praguehacks?

Earlier this year, we announced #Praguehacks, “Sharing the City,” a weekend hackathon that is taking place this coming weekend at Node5, StartupYard’s own shared workspace. The hackathon will be based on open-city data, provided by the city of Prague, and using technologies provided by our partners, including IBM, and Microsoft.

There are a raft of partners for this event, including the French Embassy in Prague, Credo Ventures, the US Embassy in Prague, the British Embassy in Prague, The Vodafone Foundation, GisMentors, and TakePlace.

The hackathon will run from this Friday evening, up to Sunday night, and will aim to generate applications, visualizations, and useful tools based on data provided by partners, including the City of Prague and the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, (IPR Praha), to make life in the city easier, safer, more ecological, and more interesting. Teams will receive access to hundreds of thousands of Czech crowns worth of services from IBM and Microsoft as part of the hackathon.

Winning teams will be eligible for fast-track selection to the StartupYard program, or to a non-profit acceleration program run by Vodafone Foundation.

129 Applications

While we had initially hoped for at least 30 teams to apply, we were soon swamped with nearly 130 applications. Clearly, this is an idea whose time has come in Prague. In the end, space limitations meant that we could accept “only” 85 teams, nearly 3 times the number originally planned.

Lead Organizer Michaela Rybickova of Fond Otakara Motejla, on the excitement leading up to the hackathon:

There have been plenty of volunteers:

The Pre-Event

Our managing director Cedric Maloux hosted a “pre-event,” Monday at Node5, to welcome the selected teams and introduce the sponsors, data, and technology to be used during the hackathon.

Speakers included: Jiří Čtyroký, director of the Spatial Information Section for IPR,  Ondřej Profant, representative of the City of Prague and Municipal District of Prague 7, Josef Gattermayer, entrepreneur and  IT consultant at Municipal District of Prague 8, Jan Cibulka, data journalist at Samizdat, and Josef Šlerka, chief of New Media Studies at Charles University, and the head of R&D at Socialbakers.

Here is some of that event in tweets and pics:

The event was highly anticipated:

 

Michal Tošovský, open data advocacy officer for Fond Otakara Motejla, talked about problems cities can solve with open data. He shared tips for city apps based on conversations with municipal representatives. 

FixMyStreet, a service presented by Lepsi Mesto (Better City), an app that allows citizens to flag and report issues in urban infrastructure and maintenance, served as inspiration for many of the attendees on what is possible with enough data.

Some friendly competition between Microsoft and IBM was encouraged by the participants:

SocialBakers’ Josef Slerka revealed a huge source of data that will be welcome at the hackathon:

One of the centerpieces of the hackathon, city data, was presented by the Prague Institute of Planning and Development.

Not all the attendees’ data dreams were fulfilled however:

Derek Eder, lead organizer of Chicago’s “Civic Hacknights” and a co-author of ClearStreets presented his work remotely. ClearStreets tracks Chicago’s snow plows in real time- giving city residents a real sense of city services at work. 

Not everybody could be there:

But a live stream of the whole weekend will be available at the #Praguehacks website:

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