Green Campus hackathon

Let's imitate the nature & let's hack together for a more sustainable future!

What a better place for a creative sustainability themed hackathon than Otaniemi (http://www.otaniemi.fi) Green Campus!

We offer real energy and social datasets to you, aiming to enable and show the potential of ICT and Big Data in tackling sustainability issues. This year, thanks to VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (http://vtt.fi), we provide real-time energy consumption data from the Otaniemi campus. We also provide tweets on energy-related topics and the data from the Finnish and international social and other media on energy, environment and sustainability related topics.

We welcome teams of 3 or 4 members. You can register with desired team members, or alone, in which case the organizers will help to assemble diverse teams.

Website: http://greencampus.greenhackathon.com

Find us on:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreenCampusCIVIS (https://www.facebook.com/GreenCampusCIVIS?ref=hl)

• Twitter: @greenhackathon

• Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/107086922111201696198 (https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/107086922111201696198/)

The organizers propose couple of hackathon themes that we identify as relevant:

• Green impact
The common denominator for most of the solutions expected of the hackathon is the environmental impact. Under this theme, we ask for the degree to which a solution achieves such goal, i.e., what is the greenest hack?
• Behavior change
One of the most challenging research topics, especially recently, is: what drives massive human behavior change? From marketing, over information spreading in social media, researchers and businesses are asking the question: what motivates the people to change and accept a new type of behavior?
When it comes to the future of our planet, there is no plan B: Can you come closer to the answer on encouraging people to change their lifestyle to a more sustainable?
• Business idea
Through this theme, we encourage innovation and entrepreneurship spirited teams. We look for most financially viable business-oriented solutions to utilize offered open datasets. Conceptual business proposals involving existing data provider companies are also encouraged.
First of all – have you identified a real NEED for your business idea?
• Media bias
Recently, increasing number of media publishers are facing critique for non-objective discussion about climate change and sustainability issues. For instance, one of the most respected European publishers, BBC, is accused of succumbing to false balance on climate by UK Parliament. At the same time, scientists are reaching almost unanimous consensus on anthropogenic nature of climate change.
Can you identify media bias from provided data? How could we work towards more objective media? Can crowdsourcing help in this case? How about scientific promotion?
• Visualization & transparency
Today, much hype is going on in media about Big Data. Big Data seems to be a promise for many problems and a solution for not-yet identified human needs. Especially when it comes to human comprehension of such Big Data, besides analytics, creative and innovative visualization capabilities are a must. We provide you with Big Data from energy and social domains. Can you do the challenging task and provide some novel data representation?
In particular, how to make the data transparent and closer to the people to comprehend? Can Augmented Reality be of help?

After the introduction by the data owners and organizers, the teams are invited to work for the two days and develop solutions, propose ideas and business models. You are encouraged to work on the proposed themes, or also to discover some different topics and needs. After a full two days of brainstorming and hacking together, we invite the teams to present their hacks. The overall best hack is selected and also best hacks in categories sponsored by the partners.