A hackathon is a an innovation event in which participants intensively work together in up to six teams to find new solutions to the challenges that urban communities are facing as they reform, restructure, and rebuild from years of urban migration.

Supported and inspired through a series of presentations, and a group of team mentors, participants ultimately present their proposals in front of senior policy makers, community leaders, and business executives, who will assess the commercial viability of each project and hopefully recommend one or more to take forward.

Structure

Objective: Create a series of program ideas to that HandsOn Shanghai could implement in 2017, with the following constraints:

1. Must be able to host 8-10 volunteers 1x per week
2. Program should be 2-3 hours in duration
3. Volunteer program should be engaging for volunteers and impactful for partner

Participants included 35 team leaders from HandsOn Shanghai programs, who has minimum 2 years volunteering experience

Outcomes

• New insights into the challenges that are being faced by Shanghai’s communities.
• Innovative ideas for bringing communities closer together through space design, community spaces, and technology platforms
• Opportunities for a wide range of stakeholders to collaborate with each other through that hackathon medium.