We’re extremely pleased with the hackathon we just held, and we’re kicking ourselves for not organizing them more often. We’ll fix that.
We received more than 100 applications to participate. Of those, 87 (including 14 teams) met the initial requirements, and we sent out invitations. Twenty participants came from other cities—Kazan, Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Stavropol, Ufa, Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk, and Yekaterinburg.
On the first day of the hackathon, there were 50 participants at the federal headquarters in Moscow and 7 at the St. Petersburg office (in the previous post, I wrote “about 80” — that was my mistake). We covered travel to Moscow for the three teams with the most interesting projects—two from St. Petersburg and one from Kazan.
In the end, 19 teams worked on projects. The youngest participant was 16, and the oldest was 41. The hackathon itself lasted 36 hours, during which the teams had to build a working prototype of a service that would be useful for the campaign. Together, the teams not only created 19 interesting projects, but also drank 63 liters (!!!) of Red Bull.
At the end of the hackathon, the jury—campaign chief Leonid Volkov, ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) director Roman Rubanov, ACF creative director Elena Marus, IT consultant Vladislav Zdolnikov, and UX expert Alexei Kopylov—selected the top three winners. They were the creators of the following projects: Navalny Live mobile app — will make it possible to listen to audio livestreams and recordings, as well as read transcripts from our YouTube channel of live broadcasts. Virtual call center — a website from which any volunteer will be able to call a voter and persuade them to vote for us Telegram CEC — a tool for collecting information from polling-station observers and monitoring the course of the election
The campaign will continue working with all of the winners and many of the other teams as well. We’ll try to release the apps for broad use by our supporters as soon as possible.
A huge thank-you to everyone. Join the next hackathon—let’s strike a blow against the regime with code.