| Tuula Loytty
Several important questions have been raised regarding the process and features of hackathon. I've asked Karel Charvat - the godfather of the Inspire Hackathons - to provide his responses. He has a long experience on different kinds of hackathons and he has been the key person to lay the principles and values of the Inspire Hackathon movement.
1. Will the participants be selected on a competitive basis or it is for everyone who will register?
Anybody can participate in this Hackathon. The goal of this Hackathon is not competition. The goal is sharing knowledge, the goal is making results of previous projects available for large community, the goal is to support capacity building and attract new people for cooperation: Hackathon is full open and has the goal to support Open Innovation, Open Data and Open Source
2. What will be the role of mentors?
The role of mentor is to moderate group work, to support cooperation to moderate activity in the group. On the work of moderator depend from large scale result of the work, because without active contribution of moderator usually group doesn’t work well
3. How will the mentors be assigned to participants?
Moderators have access to the database of all registered people and it depends on moderators, how it will contact the people. Usually moderators use Skype for discussion with its members. They establish a Skype group, and invite members to this group. If the will join it depends on them
4. How shall we provide/sieve out actual problems which the mentees will address?
Again this a lot depends on mentors and also activity of people in the group. The goal is to receive feedback from mentees, but also give them possibility to tested the tools , methods, algorithms data or developed own solution
5. Will actual applications be developed or we shall have ideas only
Yes we expect that application or new data sets have to be developed. The idea is to have a new solution using different tools. There is already some real work in some groups and anybody has possibilities to make their own solution with a number of open source solutions. There are now some offered platforms, but this platforms can be easyly replicated.
6. Will the best performing ideas/products developed be awarded or the Hackathon will be a crowdsourcing of ideas?
The idea is to look on possibilities, how the best ideas results transfer into future activities. There is number of strong partners, who can help to promote ideas and also we can look on external resources of financing
7. If actual products/ideas will be developed, how shall we handle intellectual property?
The results belong to whom, who is developing this idea. We prefer to use solutions as Open Source, but it is not obligatory and solutions belong to authors.
2. What will be the role of mentors?
The role of mentor is to moderate group work, to support cooperation to moderate activity in the group. On the work of moderator depend from large scale result of the work, because without active contribution of moderator usually group doesn’t work well
3. How will the mentors be assigned to participants?
Moderators have access to the database of all registered people and it depends on moderators, how it will contact the people. Usually moderators use Skype for discussion with its members. They establish a Skype group, and invite members to this group. If the will join it depends on them
4. How shall we provide/sieve out actual problems which the mentees will address?
Again this a lot depends on mentors and also activity of people in the group. The goal is to receive feedback from mentees, but also give them possibility to tested the tools , methods, algorithms data or developed own solution
5. Will actual applications be developed or we shall have ideas only
Yes we expect that application or new data sets have to be developed. The idea is to have a new solution using different tools. There is already some real work in some groups and anybody has possibilities to make their own solution with a number of open source solutions. There are now some offered platforms, but this platforms can be easyly replicated.
6. Will the best performing ideas/products developed be awarded or the Hackathon will be a crowdsourcing of ideas?
The idea is to look on possibilities, how the best ideas results transfer into future activities. There is number of strong partners, who can help to promote ideas and also we can look on external resources of financing
7. If actual products/ideas will be developed, how shall we handle intellectual property?
The results belong to whom, who is developing this idea. We prefer to use solutions as Open Source, but it is not obligatory and solutions belong to authors.