HackZurich is Europe’s biggest Hackathon and this year it even was the world’s first hybrid Hackathon and took place from Sep 18-20. The co-founder of the event, Jonathan Isenring, asked me earlier this year if I wanted to lead the social media team for HackZurich. I had already helped out the team during their #CodeVsCovid19 hackathon by moderating their livestreams and loved the experience. So, I said yes!
Besides organizing selfie challenges and taking care of the social media activity of HackZurich two weeks prior of the event, I also produced a few videos together with the talented cameraman/editor Philip Wilson.
Day 1: a tour behind the scenes
We started Day 1 by doing a tour through the on-site location Technopark, so that the remote participants of HackZurich would also get a glimpse—and potentially some goodies.
day 2: ms pitch perfect, mr hackathon & a pizza dinner
I must admit, I admire the community in those hackathons. Everyone is so passionate. And it’s a good example of how tech can bring us closer together: People from all over the world joined HackZurich to find solutions to today’s problems. In the live pitch sessions I hosted, there were participants from Australia, India and Iran (and it was a female coder!). The coder from Teheran, Hoda, is working on a social media that shows the credibility of the author of every post to fight fake news.
We added a few pitches from on-site and packed it all into a Best-of pitches video:
The HackZurich community is not just passionate, but has a lot of humor too. I asked the community on day 1 to send it their impressions from behind the scenes and promised the most creative contributions will get pizza delivered. Can you see the joy the guys had when I told them they won? 🥳👇🏽
There are some coders that are so passionate about hackathons that they participated in (almost) every single edition of HackZurich, which is existing since 2014!
day 3: hard decisions & real ducks
On Sunday morning the participants have to submit their projects before 9 AM via Devpost and then it’s in the jury’s hands to pick the 25 finalists. I spoke with two jury members during their evaluation:
The 25 finalists were chosen around noon and included:
Detective Carbon
MiPlan
FoodPrint
smice
Dyorka
Tim the Team Plant
Foo(d)bar
HändeWegApp
Steer
ScreenLess
CircularAsphalt
Epiphany
Environment Karaoke
AI search for spoken audio
PrimeClime
Garbage Collector
Doctor Sugar
Mirror Office
Design for Duck Technology
MI-MAP
MyGusto
Physiotherapy Aid
Corona Scare-Level (BR)
Toby Bot
MR Shopper
But only one team can win the 1st place and Ferdinand Langnickel and Kevin Smith made it with their «AI Search for Spoken Audio» solution, which helps you find specific topics in long Podcasts:
And this was it for HackZurich 2020!
A big thank you to the great team at HackZurich for making such a cool event happen: Jonathan Isenring, Setareh Gharibi, Benjamin Schneider and Rasmus Rothe as well as to the social media managers Diana Herrle and Anita Nousianien, who were a big support with their experience during the Hackathon. A shoutout to the amazing film crew with Matthias Sabelhaus and Philip Wilson and our photographers / cameramen Alan Sahin, Joel Rohland, Mehdi Yawari and Moritz Schmid.
With Diana Herrle (who already worked as social media manager for HackZurich before), photographer Moritz Schmid and Anita Nousianen on Day 1 of HackZurich.
Filming with Philip Wilson for the Pitch-Video. Photo: Joel Rohland
And here’s our response to the Duck-Pitch, which you could watch in the video above:
