What is a Food Waste Hackathon

What is a Food Waste Hackathon?

Food Waste Hackathons are an opportunity to involve local communities to contribute ideas, knowledge and interest to reduce food waste in a community, city or country. At the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons we organized 2 to 3 day events open for everyone interested to learn about food waste and contribute to develop ideas how apps can help to reduce food waste. Food Waste Experts, Students, IT experts and people with different backgrounds participated. The magic lies in the diversity of the participants of a Food Waste Hackathon. Experts or new in the field of food waste. What units us: we are all consumers and we all waste food. So we all know what would help us personally to waste less food. See here what great ideas and prototyps for apps, websites and bots were gathered in the 5 STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons.

5 STREFOWA Countries 5 Food Waste Hackathons

To gather ideas how to use technology to reduce food waste in Europe, STREFOWA organized Food Waste Hackathons in Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary and Poland. One of the ideas will be implemented by STREFOWA (first half of 2018). Further a manual will be written as a guide for everyone interested in organizing a Food Waste Hackathon in their community (available early 2018).

What is a Food Waste Hackathon?

Not just for techies

The idea and how an app, website or bot can be used to reduce food waste is far more important at our Food Waste Hackathons, than actually understanding how to program. To make sure the ideas make sense from a technical point of view, programmers advise and help on how to implement the ideas. Participants were from different professions and more than 6 countries: Environmental students, programmers, entrepreneurs, game designers, communication managers, Food Sharing activists, food waste experts and marketing experts, designers and film makers. The broad mix of professions and people made the teamwork really interesting and the results impactful.

What is a hackathon?

Hackathons come from the IT world and orignally are a coding competition. Over the last years more and more themed Hackathons are emerging to use the power of IT to solve pressing problems of our times, like food waste or integration, etc...

Who shall join a Food Waste Hackathon?

Everyone interested in reducing food waste with smart IT solutions! To plan an successful app many smart heads are needed to answer those questions everyone should ask before building an app. How would people use it? What would people expect from this app? How should it look? How would people find out about the app? How do you establish cooporations with partners to make the app impactful? How should the app be programmed?

Open Source

Ideas developed at STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons are open source (they are a team effort, based on valuable information from the experts presenting the challenges). The ideas will be shared publicly and the goal is to have them implement in as many places as possible. One idea from all 5 STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons will be implemented by STREFOWA in 2018. A STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathon is not a start-up competition and is not the best place to share secret ideas. STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons are about creating an environment to make innovation against food waste happen, for everyone to develop further.

Registration

STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons are free to participate and participants were provided with food and drinks, so that they can focus entirely on how an app can help #reducefoodwaste.

Bring your laptop and smartphone, the rest is take care of ...

Not everyone needs a laptop though.1 or 2 per team are enough. There is enough to do with a just pen and paper or a tablet.
Participants are provided you with fresh food, coffee and snacks throughout the weekend, so you can focus on ideas to reducefoodwaste.

Prizes!

To thank all of the great participants for their engagement and time to help reduce food waste, nice prizes were provided for all winning teams.

The happy winners: Food Waste Hackathon Vienna.

An indepented and local jury decides ...

... which team and idea has the biggest potential to reduce food waste, how it was implemented and planned out at the weekend of the Food Waste Hackathon, following this 3 criteria:

How much impact would it have on food waste?
How well thought out is the idea and possible implementation?
How is the visible output/presentation from the weekend?

Agenda of the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons

Friday, 5 pm - 8 pm (open for public)

5:00 Welcome
5:30 Official Opening
6:00 Challenges presented
7:00 Time to pitch ideas
7:00 - 8:00 Networking and Teambuilding

Saturday, 9 am - 6 pm Uhr (participants only)

9:00 Breakfast and Coffee
9:30- 12:30 Ideation & Team building
12:30 Lunch
01:15 Energizing Activities
01:30-6:00 Working on the solution to reduce food waste

Sunday, 9 am - 5 pm (participants only)

9:00 Breakfast and Coffee
9:30- 12:30 Teamwork
01:15 Energizing Activities
01:30 Finishing ideas and working on presentation
5:00 Handing over final presentation