Our Experiences on Running a Hackathon

We knew that we could manage only about a 100 participants, and expected to receive a larger response - so we had planned an online test as a filtering criteria.  By the time the registration period ended, we had over 1800 registrations, including teams and individuals!  However, due to the filtering, we could set a bar that would give us the desired number.  However, we discovered that many registrants were from out of town - so we used a mix of phone calls and RSVP mails to make sure that we could get close to 100 people.  At the end of this, we invited about 150 participants, and 114 showed up for the hackathon.  They were divided into 37 teams. They came from far and wide - Dehradun, New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kochi, Trichy, Vellore, ...

The youngest participant was a 12th grader, and we had many engineering college students as well!

Aadhaar APIs are publicly documented, and available to developers from the UIDAI.  There is also a staging setup against which developers can test their applications.  However, these APIs tend to be accessed only by people who are already serious about building applications.  Further, biometric devices are not really commonly available in retail - leading to another reason for developers not using these.

So, we started the program with a brief session on the Aadhaar program, introduction to Authentication APIs, and a tutorial to building Aadhaar applications.  Being a licensed AUA / KUA, we have also built some additional libraries and APIs which make it easier to build these applications. We used them for the tutorial and also made them available for the participants through the session.  We also made fingerprint sensors available to the participants.

We had also invited many mentors to the event - this included members of the TDU who were a part of the initial design process, along with the lead architects from the development team. In addition to this, we had a handful of members from Khosla Labs and Novopay.  The mentors helped the team during the ideation phase, guiding them to build practical applications that could be completed within the 24 hour period and be ready for a demo. During the 24 hour period, a very small number of participants (4 to 5 people) dropped out. The mentors continued to support the teams through the event - ensuring that, eventually 36 of the teams were ready for the demo and presentation.