Next Thursday, the non-profit organization, Trust for the Americas, will be hosting their second annual virtual Hackathon competition. They are hoping that tech-savvy Belizeans will be interested in bringing their own teams to compete for hundreds of dollars in cash prizes.
As you may be aware, a Hackathon - also called hack day, hackfest, datathon, or codefest - is an event in which computer programmers and other software developers engage in a sprint to design functioning software or hardware or solutions that can immediately be implemented.
For next week's event, competitors will be brainstorming solutions for the 2 main themes: Economic Recovery Through Tourism and Access to Health: Vaccination and Testing. For this event, the Trust For Americas will implement a regional element in which teams will be accepted from Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
This evening, the local coordinator for the Trust for the Americas granted us an interview via zoom to discuss why they are hoping that Belizeans will want to sign up to participate. Here's what she had to say:
Audrey Robin - Local Coordinator, Trust of Americas
"The reason why we developed this Hackathon with the Trust for Americas was that this Hackathon is part of a larger project that is on promoting open governance and open data in Belize. A Hackathon, in order to be successful, you need to have access to data. It's a way to show to countries, to representatives of the country what the population, stakeholders, people, citizens, youth can do when they have access to data. And that is the whole purpose of this type of activity. Give the possibility to participants, people in the country, to have access to data that sometimes they don't have access to for various reasons."
"This Hackathon will be held between the 22nd of July, so next week until Saturday, on the same week. So, it's going to be a 48-hour competition. A Hackathon is a way for developers, coders, tech-savvy people to develop solutions to specific problems that we identify this year to be related to recovery, post-COVID-19, health, and economic recovery through tourism."
"It's gonna be a regional Hackathon. Last year, it was only Belize. This year, we are gonna organize this with Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. So, we're gonna have a jury per country, with a minimum of 4 teams, up to 8 teams, to participate. So, each country will have pretty much its own participant, and each country will have three winners."
The competition will run for 48 hours, and it will conclude on Saturday, July 24th.
First-place teams from each country will receive cash prizes of $1,600, second place will receive $800 and third place will receive $400.
The Trust is still accepting potential competitors, and if you are interested, you can visit the Facebook page, Open Gov Belize.
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