A hackathon is an event where many people (often not knowing each other) come together to work on a particular problem. They bring tools or just the general ability to create documents and manage resources. It's inclusive; everybody has something to offer and something to gain. There is a distant projection as to what might be achieved, but normally one achieves only a part of the problem. You also meet a lot of people who have both similar and complementary interests.
We have something to offer. We are creating this semantic resource of the world's climate knowledge, but we don't have users at the moment. We want to reach out to as many different types of people as possible who want to use climate knowledge: people with climate knowledge, climate experts, citizens, and decision-makers. We would love to reach out to all these people and help make decisions about climate. A hackathon is one of the ways of doing it.
Let's assume that you are in the local government. You're concerned about the effect of climate change. We are trying to make this information available to help you make policy in local government, education, or all sorts of aspects of human life.
Another interesting aspect of the hackathon is we don't know what skills and knowledge participants bring. That will affect the flavour of the day. Not the core purpose. We already have a lot of bioscientists and agriculturalists registered here. We would expect there would be questions like: what is the impact of climate science on bioscience? But we also expect people from sectors we haven't come across before. They may want to familiarise themselves with IPCC.
Well, we have two aspects for the day. One is the online session, and the other is the real-life session in Delhi. 20-25 people are travelling to National Institute for Plant Genome Research, Delhi. There will be 5 of the team there to help them. We will probably break up into small groups of about 4 or 5, each with a leader from our team. Participants will work in groups with laptops, possibly with whiteboards or shared documents. The groups will jointly discuss what particular aspect of the climate reports they want to work on. So you might want to work on agriculture, policy or climate change in India.
After spending some of their time working in small groups, they come back to plenary sessions to report what they've done and hear what other people have done online. We'll be using a Discord server for communication. As we said, things are fluid because we don't know what people will bring.
The event is successful if it's valuable for people at the end of the day. This is an experiment. If you met somebody and you found out how to use this tool. If you realize how badly the greenhouse gases were affecting ocean acidity, the wide range of things that the IPCC has covered or help people understand the Indian aspect of changing monsoon weather – all are successful outcomes.
People come not knowing what to expect. Sometimes they may say that this is not what we wanted, right? That's not a failure. It's something we learn from.
Well, we know everybody is busy. This is not like an undergraduate class where you do lots of work. To ensure you make the most out of the opportunity, we recommend you:
And have fun! Looking forward to seeing all of you :)