Organised within the scope of the H2020 CUTLER project, the #WaterFrontHack Global Online Hackathon is an opportunity for students, researchers, developers, policy and domain experts around the world to come together and address the challenges of sustainable development in coastal urban areas. 

Important Dates

• Final Submission: October 18th 2020, 23:59 CET. 
• Announcement of Results: October 23rd 2020 14:00 CET.

The hackathon welcomes local, national and regional software solutions that will help improve data analysis and visualization for decision and policy-making in coastal urban areas that will help foster urban resilience. Participants wishing to register for the hackathon are encouraged to familiarize themselves with CUTLER’s GitHub repository and the related Policy Briefs (pdf).

Registration page: 

https://www.cutler-h2020.eu/hackathon/

The three teams with the greatest average score will be given awards in the form of ICT equipment of their own choosing. More specifically, there will be three prizes:

• 1st Place: 3,000 EUR
• 2nd Place 1,500 EUR
• 3rd Place: 500 EUR

Project Challenge and Tracks

The overall objective of the hackathon is to create functioning software solutions, namely open-source interactive dashboards, that will help policymakers better understand information pertaining to the economic, social, and environmental impact of policies on urban areas surrounded by a large body of water. Participants are strongly encouraged to address problems that fit within one or more of the following tracks. We also welcome projects that target issues that may fall beyond the scope of these tracks given that they are solving a validated end-user need:

1. Water-related policies, e.g water-based tourism, activities in the waterfront, flood protection management, water-related recreational activities, coastal management, tourism and gig economy in waterfront cities.  
2. Collecting, sharing and analysing heterogeneous data from social, economic, and environmental sources (e.g. citizen engagement and crowdsourcing citizen science platforms, social media, big data repositories, or National Statistical Offices).
3. Novel interactive big data visualizations and dashboards with open source tools (e.g. Kibana) that can enable policy-makers to gain data-driven insights and help improve decision-making in urban coastal fronts. 
4. End-to-end data pipelines using on-premise or cloud-based data platforms using established technology stacks (e.g. ELK, Hadoop).
5. Whenever possible, solutions should take into account algorithmic bias and Machine Learning fairness as to alleviate existing socio-economic exclusion and inequalities that prevent individuals and groups from fully participating in the economic, social, and decision-making process of their community.  
6. Other (Hacker’s Choice).