Code for India, the non-profit organization that inspires techies to volunteer their time and talent to the developing world, today announced a first-of-its-kind parallel India-United States hackathon to be held May 9-10 at the Google campuses in Bangalore and in Mountain View. The event will gather engineers interested in creating technology-based applications that empower poor populations to address specific public service delivery problems.
Infosys Founder and Chairman N.R. Narayan Murthy and Google Senior Vice President Amit Singhal will provide keynote remarks.
The hackathon is co-sponsored by the World Bank Institute, the World Bank Group’s Open Finances team and Code For Resilience, a project of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and ICT Unit of the World Bank in partnership with Code for Japan. Other partners and supporters include Amazon, Cisco, Google, TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), NASSCOM Foundation and AFI (Action for India).
Code For India is one of the fastest growing tech-driven non-profits with thousands of volunteering engineers from Google, Facebook, Linkedin, VMware, Oracle, Cisco, Visa, Infosys, and many more engaging to promote transparency, participation and efficiency in the way local people can voice their concern and find solutions,” said Karl Mehta, founder of Code for India and venture partner at Menlo Ventures. “The transformative power of technology will aid India -- and other developing countries facing similar problems --fight the failing public service infrastructure.”
A key theme of the event is making India more resilient to natural disasters like earthquakes, drought or cyclones. Teams of hackers that register their disaster resilience apps at www.CodeForResilience.org by May 11, 2014 will be eligible for a grand prize trip to London, England to pitch their idea to an audience of over 800 disaster risk management experts gathering for the Understanding Risk conference.
The hackathon also will seek to catalyze developers to consider the commercial value of open data in India, including social enterprise opportunities. With the launch of India’s Open Government Data Platform, opportunities for developers to identify market gaps, create new data-driven products and services, and improve operational efficiency in existing organizations are steadily growing.
The World Bank Institute and the World Bank Group’s Open Finances team have provided open data sets to Code for India for the event. These data sets include development and financial data as well as existing public sector and IFC projects, and will be a critical resource for participants in the hackathon.
More details about how to register for the Code for India hackathon can be found at http://codeforindia.org/cfi-hackathon/
No comments:
Post a Comment