Presentation from my keynote at Hackathon on Crisis Applications, an event organized by the Digital Society Initiative at the University of Zürich on October 30, 2025.

Over three days, students will be working on the creation of crisis response applications addressing real-world problems. As part of the Government as a Platform research project, the project team is organizing a hackathon where students can work on practical problems in close collaboration with the experts in the field. The goal is to come up with new innovative solutions for crisis response to enhance digital resilience of our society. – dsi.uzh.ch

Since childhood, I've been a fan of programming contests, science fairs and hackathons. This picture of me was taken by a friend in Lausanne some ten years ago. Very much in my element, I'm unpacking open hardware kits to help small teams of people work in a public space on agricultural challenges from a department of the Swiss Federal Government, articulated with Sustainable Development Goals.

Whether hackathons take part over the course of a few hours, or several days, the idea is generally the same: challenges are the input, around which teams of volunteers form to work within strict time-limits on a solution, usually documented and presented in the form of a pitch as the output.

An event where programmers() meet for 
{collaborative computer programming}.

Today you don't need to write code to create software, but in popular awareness, hackathons are still rooted in the rites and rituals of computer programmers. This is also how I also got to know the format, by taking part in the very technical hackathons of Silicon Valley companies and open source communities. We should aim for a more inclusive definition of 'hackathon', that explains civil society engagements from diverse stakeholders.

The relationship between hackathons and crisis response, particularly visible through international solidarity and disaster relief, is an increasingly important topic. Volunteers from around the world work together to map roads, collect data to assess damage, or to support infrastructure critical for aid delivery. Random Hacks of Kindness were set up to coordinate global hackathons focused on disaster response, or even just to support charities with tools for information management and response. These events often prioritize projects that can be rapidly deployed or scaled during crises. They were my first hackathons in Switzerland, and I contributed to the development of tools to locate lost relatives.

Following the Haiti earthquakes in 2010 and 2021, Typhoon Haiyan in 2014, and many other disaster areas, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team organizes global initiatives to rapidly update maps for relief efforts. This week, Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica (data on affected areas pictured above) is in the news as the "storm of the century", leading to outpourings of support aid and interventions. It's quite likely there will be some hackathons to deal with the aftermath, a format that brings institutions and communities together.

Today with the proliferation of corporate advocacy and technology-invested governments, giant companies are often behind hacker relief programs, such as IBM's Call for Code Hackathon to find solutions for natural disasters, pictured in a news article above. Perhaps the motivation here is Corporate Social Responsibility, almost certainly such events (with grand prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars) are not an act of simple charity. Here the crisis hackathon is a highly strategic element of marketing and tech evangelism.

One research hypothesis, is that participants from different cultures and backgrounds contribute to solutions that can be uniquely adapted to certain contexts. In the best case, this helps to foster a culture of global solidarity and mutual support in crisis response. Working with a pilot group of refugee and migrant participants, and their support organizations, the dynamics of hackathon inclusivity are being studied by my colleagues at BFH and UZH on the HackIntegration project.

Seen in events like Versus Virus during the COVID-19 pandemic, or hackathons organized for beneficial causes like Ageing Well and Social Work, a dynamic develops that has been the subject of analysis. Such studies have already shown that open mapping initiatives like OSM can increase the efficiency of disaster response. For example, the World Bank found that OSM data helped in routing aid convoys and identifying areas of need more effectively, though challenges like data quality and validation were noted. I am eager to support research into the effects of hackathons like the one shown above, and am developing my own data aggregation tools while supporting global advocacy.

Most recently, the Swiss {ai} Weeks formed as a broad grassroots alliance around the debate (some people consider them a brewing crisis) on the sovereignty (trustworthiness) and sustainability (ecological and otherwise) of AI technologies. Supporting the Apertus model built to benefit the public good, a dozen hackathons and over two hundred meetups were run on the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. I cover this in some detail in my blog (utou.ch)

Last week, we had a workshop last week with a small scholarly community addressing such topics of interest at an international level. We shared data across events and borders, involved ethical and peer review, identified gaps and collected ideas for research direction. Visit the Impact section of our shared library for more literature and evidence-based publications. We would very much like to hear from you about any critical thoughts or directions.

In conclusion, I'd like to send you off with three calls-to-action:

💻💡 raw;data;now!

Hackathons and open mapping efforts have been instrumental in mobilizing international solidarity and addressing crisis response challenges. They enable rapid, crowdsourced data collection and analysis, support early warning systems, facilitate collaboration across borders, and question the often inefficient and unequitable status quo.

How will you use the data available to you today?
What is still missing to complete the picture?
What data will you create in the process?

🇯🇲 Support Jamaica

Examples from COVID-19, geopolitical or natural catastrophe highlight the potential of tech-community-driven initiatives to support relief and preparedness efforts. Addressing opportunistic or hypocritical aspects concerns requires a careful ethical engagement, community involvement, and sustainable, context-sensitive solutions. Here are some suggestions, collected with the help of Apertus:

• Openly discuss intentions, limitations, and potential challenges upfront.
• Ensure local stakeholders are involved from the outset and have decision-making power (co-design).
• Plan for post-event support and maintenance, rather than just the hackathon itself.
• Regularly assess impact and be transparent about outcomes, successes, and failures.
• Respect Local Knowledge: prioritize local expertise and solutions over imposed techno-fixes.
• Encourage media to cover the complexities of crisis response and avoid simplistic "tech saves the day" narratives.

Many thanks to all the DSI event organizers and supporters for your interest and our discussions today. Good luck at the hackathon!

Further reading

Choices We Make in Times of Crisis. Waeber et al, Sustainability 2021, 13(6), 3578

Hack for impact – sociomateriality and the emergent structuration of social hackathons. Faludi 2023

Engagement in Practice: Social Performance and Harm in Civic Hackathons. Angela Chan 2021

The potential and challenges of open data for crisis information management and aid efficiency: A preliminary assessment. Stauffacher et al 2011