By Chris Lewis | Vol 8 No. 21 (Nov. 7, 2019)
There were plenty of eager faces filling up the Reid Community Centre in Mount Pearl this past Sunday.
Hacking Mount Pearl was a three-day event that took place at the Reid Community Centre throughout the weekend of Nov. 1 to Nov. 3.
The event saw teams ranging in sizes and skillsets aim to tackle any one issue from a list provided by the city of Mount Pearl.
These topics ranged from things like climate change and emission control, to citizen communication. Some teams even attempted to take on issues that they recognized within the City, such as the public transportation system.
Fantastic Five won first place in the first Mount Pearl hackathon for their solution titled Fund Box, which aimed to simplify the application and funding process for employees of the municipality. From left to right are Soheil Mousavi, Chukwuebuka Amaefula, Reza Ghasemi, Eddy St. Coeur, and Jaxon Miller. Submitted Photo.
A hackathon is typically held within the growing technology scene to try and take on coding issues, or to develop smartphone apps. However, while the idea was similar in this case, the goal was not to create the next Angry Birds, and instead aimed to find an innovative way, through technology, to address some of the problems that Mount Pearl is facing as a municipality.
The issues laid out by the City were compiled through a collaboration with Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador, and were common issues faced by communities across the province.
Teams gathered together to kick off the event on Friday evening, and were hard at work all throughout Saturday as they developed their solutions, as well as a presentation.
Those presentations were the main event at the Centre on Sunday, with each team being given a firm three-minute time frame to present their idea to a panel of judges, who were then given a few minutes to question the team.
“The ideas that are being presented, they should not die today in the event that nobody gets cut a cheque. Because, what we’re working on are real sustainability issues for some people - they are very real world problems that don’t have to be exclusive to Mount Pearl,” explained Jason Piercey, who acted as the emcee of the event on Sunday. “These have the potential to be really big things, so don’t just stop because you don’t win.”
There were nearly 20 teams that presented ideas and solutions to the crowd that day. Some looked at ways to help City employees track down and secure funding opportunities, while others offered incentive programs that would potentially boost the number of people making use of the City’s recycling programs.
Hackathon second winners
CityOS won second place in Mount Pearl’s hackathon for their titular solution, an integrated communication hub to help City officials simplify their communication processes between internal departments, external partners, and citizens. From left to right are Frank Nie, Nana Abekah, Farah Dean, Asfand Tareen, and Haris Barki. Submitted photo
The judge panel was given the difficult task of reducing these 17-teams down to three winners.
The third place winning team received $2,000 in cash. That award was presented to Landwash Hackish. This team aimed to take on the challenge of resident notices. Their product was simply named Pearl, a cloud-based AI communication platform that looked to track and improve the communications between the City and its residents, as well as internally with the City’s staff.
Coming in second place on Sunday was CityOS, who also tackled the same challenge as Landwash Hackish. CityOS is a platform on which City officials can smoothly connect with residents, all while aiming to simplify the process of communicating between internal departments of the City, as well as partners on the outside.
CityOS, for placing second, received $3,500 in cash, as well as a $5,000 operating capital to help bring their solution to completion.
First place went to the Fantastic Five, a team who took on the challenge of ‘funding frustration.’
Fantastic Five, composed of Soheil Mousavi, Chukwuebuka Amaefula, Reza Ghasemi, Eddy St. Coeur, and Jaxon Miller, developed Fund Box throughout the weekend. Fund box is a program custom built for municipalities in managing the application process from start to finish. The goal, as was outlined by the team on Sunday, is to make the lives of municipalities much easier.
“Jeremy Schwartz is an economic development officer with the City of Mount Pearl. He spends parts of his days sourcing funding opportunities, completing applications, and trying to manage those reports on the back end,” said Eddy St. Coeur, one of the Fantastic Five, during their presentation on Sunday. St. Coeur explained that Fund Box, their solution, would make the work of Schwartz, and anyone else in a similar role, much simpler and easier to manage.
“There are other solutions on the market already. Some of them do project management, some of them do funding management, some of them are funding databases, but one thing that we learned, from talking to the City of Mount Pearl, is that they’re unable to source a Canadian solution that fits all three. So, we created Fund Box.”
For coming in first place, Fantastic Five was awarded with $7,500 in cash, $10,000 in operating capital to help bring Fund Box to fruition, as well as two seats in the A1Next incubator for a span of 12-months.
