Anti-Virus hacking!

This weekend, Latin America is hacking the virus. Join the Online Hackathon today from your couch and help create solutions to the Covid-19 crisis across Latin America.

How can we, as a society, address the challenges that arise from the COVID-19 crisis with new solutions? That’s the driving force behind the COVID Hackathon challenge that has taken over the world the past weeks, from Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Cambodia, and now coming to Latin America this weekend.

The online collaborative effort is a community-driven initiative that looks for daring and innovative ideas to help society emerge stronger from the current difficult situation caused by the novel coronavirus. In a 48 hour online Hackathon over the course of this weekend, people all over Latin America will come together to create solutions and concepts in a short amount of time. A hackathon (a word created from “hack” and “marathon”) is a collaborative solution development event. The goal of a hackathon is to find useful, creative or entertaining solutions in a collaborative effort to solve problems.

Read our latest coverage on the coronavirus in Colombia

For this to work, the #CadaDiaCuentaHackathon needs a strong, diverse community. That means people with very different perspectives and abilities. You do not need to be an entrepreneur, programmer, or hacker to contribute. No matter if you are a creator, a doctor, teacher, designer, an IT specialist, a project manager, a scientist or just a keen problem solver – everyone is welcome to join. No coding skills are required!

There are multiple ways to get involved, you can register as a participant, as a mentor guiding one of the challenge teams, as a partner to the initiative, or registering a challenge for the Hackathon to solve. Everyone is somehow affected by the Covid crisis, and if you are facing a challenge, many others across the region are likely facing the same one as well.

A few pre-selected categories under which challenges can be submitted are: health system; economic impact; solidarity and cohesion; public policy and civic participation; social inclusion; food; education; and data intelligence.

This cross-border virtual initiative is driven by local teams including Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti and Mexico, and has the support of over 30 organisations such as UNDP, the Young Americas Business Trust of the OAS, Sistema B, Techo, SGS, Selina, as well as local governmental agencies such as Innpulsa. Scalable solutions may become more directly accelerated in a second stage with the support of different allies.

The Hackathon takes place online and virtually, using platforms such as google drive, whatsapp as well as video conferencing for live webinars, Q&A sessions and daily check-ins. Detailed technical instructions and access to the individual tools will be sent to all registered participants in due time. The registration deadline is midnight tonight (1 April). For more information as well as registration forms go to https://cadadiacuenta.org/.