Title: Hackathon Challenges Georgetown to Transform University
About 130 students, faculty members, alumni and staff at Georgetown will come together for 36 hours Nov. 17-18 to design a new product, process or app that “transforms” how the university community lives and learns.
“This is an extraordinary creative opportunity for the Georgetown community to work across disciplines to solve some of the challenges the university faces in the way we live, learn, work, play and serve on campus,” says Lisa Davis, chief information officer, about the Georgetown Hackathon.
Faculty and staff will serve as mentors for the 20 teams of students and alumni competing in “Georgetown Hackathon.”
Each team gets three minutes to present ideas to a panel of top administrators and industry experts. At the end of the event, the top three teams are announced and the winning team will receive a cash prize of $2,000.
Judges include several university leaders as well as representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former assistant secretary for communications and information at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
“This is an extraordinary creative opportunity for the Georgetown community to work across disciplines to solve some of the challenges the university faces in the way we live, learn, work, play and serve on campus,” says Lisa Davis, chief information officer. “The aim is to create tangible prototypes and solutions that will better the Georgetown student experience.”
The event is co-sponsored by Davis’ office and Palantir (a software company) in collaboration with the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Chief Operating Officer, University Information Services and the McDonough School of Business.
It is being billed as “not just for techies.”
“You can be a financial modeling junkie, a social media guru,an eloquent speechwriter, an international relations expert ora fundraising genius,” reads the flyer for the event.
Georgetown Hackathon also includes a session by Richard Culatta, deputy director of the Office of Education Technology in the U.S. Department of Education, on the latest innovation trends in education technology, across relevant industries and at other universities.