Radiology Hackathon

Hi Everyone! Greetings for the New Year :smiley:

@judywawira and I have been brainstorming possibilities for organizing a hackathon on the radiology project. The idea is to find good students and motivated developers to contribute to the mission. In Singapore last year, @downey, @sunbiz and I had explored venues/ logistics of organizing hackathons there. In the months that followed, I was able to identify more potential hosting platforms and venues. All the research on these is shared towards the end of this message. Having said that, I would love get your views on the following :slight_smile:

  1. What do you think about the idea?
  2. Are there any plans for us to participate in GSoC 17. It could be a great incentive for students to join in. Are there any other incentives you can think of (internhsips, hackathon swag, $500-1000 cash awards?)
  3. Can we get any sponsors (goodies, prizes, DO credits etc) such as Digital Ocean, GitHub etc. for this event (if you know someone there who could help out)
  4. Suggestions for hackathon projects students can work on. (Implement a new feature in Radiology module etc. ) p.s We could definitely extrapolate this idea to cover wider aspects of LH

Here are the potential hosts/platforms I can think of :slight_smile:

#Offline/ On-Site hackathons

Singapore

Preparation Status : Researching of Hackspaces done. Hackathon site identified. Hackathon Site : Ngee Ann Polytechnic Date : to be confirmed after rekindling discussions with Huiren Woo (a really versatile student we met in Singapore) Sponsors: Sponsor proposal was drafted last spring. Needs upgradation Expected turnout : >500 students from Singapore

Delhi, Innov8 coworking

Collaborating company : www.hellomeets.com Venue : https://www.innov8.work/ Date : around Feb 2017 Sponsors : not yet identified. Would be good to have some Expected turnout : local developers + students (100-125)

HelloMeets is a startup where they are constantly organizing tech talks/ meetups around Delhi. They are recently becoming interested in GSoC and open source and trying to reach out to GSoC org admins/mentors ex-students etc to help them with their GSoC sessions. So, we could definitely step in and help them with their open source goals while they help us with organizing the hackathon here. (getting sponsors/ marketing advertising, venue etc)

Delhi, National Institute of Technology

Collaborating institute : NIT Delhi (http://nitdelhi.ac.in) Venue : NIT Delhi Date : March 23-24, 2017 Sponsors : Location will be made available (more negotiations to be done about food/accommodation for students who might travel). Expected Turnout : 100-125 students (mostly from Delhi, but some from outside/ neighboring regions) I am a senior year student here. I think a hacakthon with an incentive to travel to @judywawira’s lab as a summer intern and/or GSoC incentive could be helpful. We already have a list of sponsors we can contact to see if they wanna hop in. (the tech society of my college is constantly looking for sponsors to help with our Tech Fest and have graciously agreed to share it with us).

#Online hackathons

Devpost

  • Devpost always has a lot of online/virtual hackathons running all year round. They generally go on from anywhere in between a week to a month or more. We can definitely create one there anytime. Although using a platform such as Devpost answers most of the questions listed here, we should talk on the remaining ones (hackathon theme, prizes, judging, shipping prizes etc):

  • To ensure a good turnout (in terms of quality and quantity both), it would be good to have incentives/ sponsors/investment ($500-1000 to winning team should be really good…not cash necessarily. AWS/ DIgitalOcean credit, T-shirts etc would do too) and a good cause (which we already have :smiley: ). I also think intern opportunity/ GSoC help spice it up too.

HackFest

Found another small but good article on virtual hackathons : http://mediashift.org/2013/06/how-to-organize-a-successful-hackathon159/

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We’d need to find sponsors…I’m fairly certain LibreHealth itself doesn’t have much funding as of yet…

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I agree. I’d love to hear if @downey knows anyone who could help sort these out :slight_smile:

We may or may not be able to leverage contacts at the Software Freedom Conservatory, of which we are a member project…let’s not make this corporate, that always bugged me.

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Personally, I’ve never been much for hackathons. They are too short for getting meaningful contributions, particularly to domain specific software systems like EHRs. I’ve tried at least organizing 3 such events for OpenMRS and nothing much came out of it. There are off course certain domains for which they are great.

This is not to discourage anyone from organizing hackathons. Just that there is a lot of work to simplify the domain, including tutorials that will help people participating in hackathons get quickly up to speed.

I think GSoC, on the other hand is a different story. It encourages people to start early with the community, gives a clear cut project scope and good structure/timeline. I think we should participate and start getting some project ideas out on the gitlab pages.

The hackathons are a good avenue to attract good students for projects I think