How Digital Inclusion Can Help Solve Grand Challenges
Hackathon events usually run over several days and involve hundreds or even thousands of people brainstorming and critiquing projects. Before the pandemic, most events were done in person or through a combination of in-person and remote efforts. But once the pandemic was underway, those models were no longer feasible.
When we conducted a global study of over 68 wholly digital hackathons that took place in 2020, we uncovered a common concern among organizers of these virtual events: How could they best ensure people’s effective participation?
Even in normal circumstances, hackathons require clear guidelines to facilitate effective ideation and collaboration. In trying to solve grand challenges in a pandemic-secure environment, the question of how to build successful experiences took on a novel permutation.
Our study looked at national and regional events designed to develop innovative solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. Typically organized over a 48-hour period, these events required individuals — usually complete strangers — to log on and organize themselves into teams of five to 10 people with diverse knowledge and skill sets. Each team had to quickly coalesce around a COVID-19-related issue — such as health care, mobility, education, or communication — to develop a working prototype for submission to an evaluating jury. Each team received mentoring and feedback during the process. These events were organized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), public sector agencies, and local startups. Participants included employees of the organizing groups, students, retirees, and other interested volunteers.
However, designing for entirely online formats required organizers to look beyond which digital platforms to choose and which tools to adopt (although those are important steps). It calls for an organizational and mindset shift for making the virtual collaboration work. And when collaborating with people who are not from a single organization, especially on grand challenge topics such as regional responses to the pandemic, it was important to recognize and address the often overlooked topic of digital inclusivity.
These particular hackathons offered valuable insights into how to make remote collaboration succeed with participants who have varied backgrounds, perspectives, and experience with technology. In addition, the design principles that emerged as crucial for ensuring digital inclusivity — choosing simple tools, paying attention to onboarding and support, focusing on learning and community, making sure the event is scalable, and bringing along the fun — are applicable in other collaborative situations beyond hackathons.
Hackathons offer new energy for initiatives related to wide-ranging societal challenges. The events addressing the pandemic that we looked at facilitated sprint-style conversations to broaden the scope of potential solutions that would otherwise be limited to the input of a few experts. They purposely were designed to harness the collective effort of large numbers of diverse individuals.
“Our target audience was anybody in the world who had an idea and who could participate,” explained Philippe Linster, CEO of House of Startups, an organization of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, and the director of Hack the Crisis Luxembourg. The April 2020 event drew 200 online participants who reviewed 33 project ideas during the 48-hour session.
But people from all walks of life come with a wide level of digital skills and knowledge. Lisa Mallner, a manager with the economic development organization Copenhagen Capacity and a volunteer leader of Hack the Crisis Denmark, said that a lack of familiarity with certain online collaboration tools effectively marked a digital divide among individuals. “There was a lot of resistance around basic things, like learning Slack,” said Mallner. That resistance could have prevented collaboration and knowledge sharing from taking place at all.
