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To illuminate with a searchlight. How to get maximum impact on "social" hackathons?

The purpose of the “impact hackathons" is to create as many applications with the so-called social effect at the exit. Social effect is a set of positive changes in the life of target groups (clients, beneficiaries) that occur due to the project. The article puts the thesis that the roots of many social problems are in the defects of information exchange, and therefore it is possible to start solving physical problems by identifying and understanding information. And it’s worth practicing on “social hackathons”.

Custom Hackathon


In April 2015, the St. Petersburg journalist Serafim Romanov held , at that time, a very unusual hackathon. This was not the first Russian hackathon - at that time there were quite a lot of hackathons - in all, probably hundreds of such events could be counted. But by the 15th year, the sun of the hackathons began to gradually set. If in 2011 and 12 at hackathons you could still see the birth of new ideas, unusual applications, MVPs of fresh IT products, then the percentage of repetitions only increased.

As ideas appeared on the market, a prototype of which can be somehow realized in two days (a frequent requirement for a presentation at a hackathon), the results of the hackathons were (and, in many respects, remain) quite depressing - all the same, services, maps, tinders (applications that simplify the tasks of matching), later chat bots and “something there on the blockchain, but we did not manage to finish it”.

In addition, the hackathons determined in understandable genres, depending on the motives of those who organized them. For example, a company wanted to introduce developers to its framework or ecosystem. Or the owner of the data sets wanted to play with that data. Or the company was looking for employees in the staff, and at the same time a little intellectual property created at the hackathon. Finally, there was also the classic “hackathon without prize” genre, when a community of technology enthusiasts simply featured code and shared experiences (my favorite type is not an impact hackathon).

Finally, the type of hackathons stood out, which stood slightly apart from the purely technical hackathons (the very hackathons where programmers are in short supply). Let's call them “impact hackathons", i.e. The organizer's goal was to create as many applications with the so-called social impact at the exit. Social Impact (“social effect” in Russian literature, and “impact” in business circles) is a long-known concept in the social environment, but it makes its way into the technological environment in roundabout ways, primarily from press releases of Silicon Valley companies. Social effect is a set of positive changes in the life of target groups (clients, beneficiaries) that occur due to the project.



“Dad, can we do something about this?” - the inscription in the information center of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. Source: Wikipedia: Jacklee (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

In general, the leaders of technology companies (Bill Gates, the late William Hewlett, Gordon Moore - they all founded funds with huge capital) are the largest philanthropists (although, of course, there are questions to them ), but their effect is not limited only to sharing of banknotes - but this is a different story. The important thing is that impact is the case when a hype story benefits the rest of the world. Impact can be achieved not only by “standard philanthropy”, but also by smart technological solutions. To summarize, impact production is when your project not only solves the applied problem, but also repairs the world around.

But back to St. Petersburg. JourHack, the hackathon of Seraphim, belonged to the last “social” type, but was very different from previous similar events. It was the first hackathon in Russia of data-based journalistic projects.
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As a result of the hackathon, 26 projects were created, most of which are now only available through the Web archive. Studies shed light on topics that, as a rule, like to be kept in the background: sports pharmaceuticals, systematic rise in the cost of construction contracts, the impact of new laws on the adoption of orphans, alternative civilian service, the situation with student dormitories, etc. Such projects could be brought to mind. for two days in the creative atmosphere of the hackathon and provide them with a sufficiently high degree of survival (i.e., independent realizability outside the event). The hackathon results received hundreds of comments and caused a lot of controversy.


Jourhack. Hackathon members. Courtesy of the hackathon organizers.

JourHack showed that contextualization of data and an in-depth analysis of cause-effect relationships together with good visualization can bring the same impact to a larger extent than less focused impact hackathons.

Why? Let's explore the issue.

Two types of problems


All social problems can be divided into two types: physical and informational . And their decision methods are fundamentally different.

Physical problems are, for example, the lack of infrastructure for people with disabilities. If there is no elevator in your house, and you are in a wheelchair, then even an ordinary walk will be a very serious challenge. Or bad weather in February in the northern hemisphere, and, as a result, higher consumption of resources for heating, chronic northern depression, etc. The only solution to this problem is to move somewhere yourself. Physical problems are in the world of atoms, real objects, on the other side of the screen. You cannot solve these problems with IT.

The main difference between any information problems and physical ones is that they can at least be tried to be corrected with the help of IT solutions. In addition, solving physical problems, as a rule, is much more expensive than informational ones.

Information Issues


The most well-known types of information problems are associated with a lack of information, knowledge or understanding of a phenomenon. For example, the lack of information, and therefore knowledge, that the earth is round, for a long time restrained international trade and supported the most conservative systems of social structure for centuries.

The economist Friedrich von Hayek singled outthe problem of incomplete knowledge and the inability of centralized statistical systems to take into account “special knowledge of fast-moving circumstances”, which is available at a much lower level - for example, at the level of entrepreneurs. This argument was one of the central to his criticism of command and control. You can probably even call it an “information meta-problem”, which characterizes hyper-centralized control systems with a defective system for collecting and using knowledge. Those. not optimal system of obtaining and interpreting information leads to systematically not optimal decision-making.

Regardless of whether we live in a market or command-administrative (although, personally, of course, I will choose a market) system, all social systems are constructed. Invented on the basis of past social challenges, the experience of fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. Values, rules, laws, bonds, and moral standards are the result of meaningful and unreasonable decisions of previous generations, made on the basis of the information and knowledge that was available to them, and which withstood competition with alternative ideas and practices.

Unlike the physical reality that surrounds us, society and the processes taking place in it fall under the influence of information problems. And therefore decisions.

The greenhouse of social technology has spent eight incomplete years hackathons to solve social problems. During this time we have seen various examples of projects. Projects varied both in terms of adequacy and degree of severity. There were examples when people wanted to solve a physical problem rather than an information one at a hackathon. In 2015, an elderly man came to an hackathon in Irkutsk from an eco-settlement and said that he had arrived at a hackathon to win 60 thousand rubles to buy a truck crane.

Most hackers do not always make sense of projects and do not always understand which problem they are solving, and whether the so-called "Root". By "root" (or root) problem we understand - the reason that generates the rest. The root cause is the answer that you come to using the methodology for studying cause-effect relationships “ 5 why ?” Those. Applications, services, or projects struggle with symptoms, not the causes of social ailments.

IT solutions are tools for solving not all problems. In 2013, the journalist Yevgeny Morozov introduced the term “ solutism ”, which described the desire to solve all social problems with technical solutions (and even, to some extent, overdid it, having covered almost the entire technical establishment).

But, what then can be solved by our keyboard solo?

At the impact hackathon, it is possible to develop solutions that either allow social problems to be identified, or they can be more effectively addressed. And the JourHack mentioned above was special just because it focused only on identifying problems. Or he tried to identify symptoms of suboptimal decision-making that demonstrate themselves through social problems.

Effective identification


Well-collected and visualized data can tell beautiful stories. A great storyline is the search for inequality. Inequality can be interpreted as a symptom of an information problem or a knowingly unfair information design. Acting in the same logic with the help of data you can detect, for example, a lack of infrastructure. Especially these discoveries look spectacular when you can see not only the deficit in itself, but also compare this deficit with the plans of the city authorities. For example, are you going to build parks where the area of ​​parks per capita is lower than in other areas? If not, why?

Data may reveal poor quality or suspicious activity. In 2017, journalist Viktor Borisov, for example, was able to documentdeterioration of air quality in cars of a certain type in the Moscow metro. RBC journalists Dada Lindell and Yevgeny Tarasenko were able to find out the reasons for the constant costly repairs on the same Moscow streets - the city replaced the 8-year street repair cycles with three-year ones. The publication format does not allow journalists to draw conclusions, but sometimes "everything is clear already."

In February 2018, at the Deklarabum hackathon, employees of the data department of Novaya Gazeta, Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, examined the declarations of 59 thousand officials and found stable links between the so-called “Clans” or “clips” of officials who move from department to department after their leader if he changes jobs. The average size of such a visible part of the clip (stable group) is about 4 people, but it is possible that some groups can be significantly larger (due to those officials who hold lower positions and do not submit declarations). Later, this project came to life in the form of “ VIP Nomads ” material . The problem in the discovered phenomenon is that personal relations when hiring for important positions can lead to a direct conflict of interests (when a friend is not the most suitable, but hired).

In May 2019, the Newspaper held a hackathon dedicated to the identification of discrimination, i.e. restrictions on the rights of a group of people united on some basis. Direct or indirect discrimination is not always easy to identify. Not easy, but possible. Based on court cases, the winning project found that 80% of murders committed by women was related to domestic violence and, as a rule, was self-defense.

In addition, the data allows us to determine the “bottleneck”, etc., that is, those structural obstacles that are sometimes not visible to the simple eye, but become apparent as a result of data analysis. Problems immediately appear on the observer (and sometimes many observers), the problem comes to the surface and something needs to be done with it, ignoring it in the shade will not work out very well. As Linus’s law states, “with enough eyes, bugs come to the surface.”

Another St. Petersburg scientist and activist Alexander Karpov shares his experience of using works based on data:
“It is very important to collect and provide data at the right time. At the stage when the decision is only groping. Once it is formed, changing something is very difficult. ”
The formation of opinions, arguments and a meaningful and evidence-based position is a very important process in any civilized society. That is why data is important for a real impact.

Challenges of the Decade


Five years after JourHack, the Social Technology Greenhouse, Novaya Gazeta and Serafim Romanov are joining forces to spotlight the problems and their root causes with a floodlight. This weekend we are holding in St. Petersburg dedicated to the use of data to solve the problems identified in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Being at the very beginning of the new decade, we want to be ahead of schedule with journalists, programmers and designers and create significant projects that will make the challenges of the next decade more clear. Acceptance of applications has already been completed, but we are still looking for specialists. The list of projects and needs is as specific as possible:

  • 4 front-end programmers
  • 3 bekender
  • GIS programmer
  • 2 UX Designer
  • 2-3 lovers to parse sites
  • 1 SPSS Specialist

There is no specific reference to the hackathon, and it is worth noting that this hackathon is only one of the elements of a meaningful techno-culture.

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