Programme Structure
26th Sep – Kickoff
Hack4Good begins with a kick-off event at the ETH Student Project House. At the kick-off, the participating non-profits will present selected challenges and the ensuing projects they host with Hack4Good. The participants then form a team around each project. You will also get to meet your teammates and make some first exploratory steps to understand your challenge and the data available. Over the entire course of the project, you will have a direct contact person on the side of the non-profits whom you can ask questions on the relevant data and discuss ideas with. Your team will also be supported with inputs, tools and feedback by a mentor who is an industry-experienced data scientist. You will meet your organisation contact and mentor at the kick-off as well.
Hack Days & Hack Nights
During eight weeks, you and your team mates will organise your project, distribute tasks and manage the project schedule. You will be able to use the facilities of the ETH Student Project House as meeting areas and for work. Hackdays and hacknights occur several times during the course of the programme. All teams come together to work on their projects and there will be plenty of pizza as well as time to exchange your thoughs with other participants.
7th Oct – Agile Workshop
Your Hack4Good journey is supported by a range of workshops, first of which being the Agile Workshop. You will be exposed to an project management approach that is used for software development. It assists your team to respond to the unpredictability of constructing software. This event will get you started with organising the full project.
24th Oct – Impact Workshop
Here, you will learn the theoretical concepts behind impact evaluation and apply them directly on your project. Some questions you will have to answer: How can the impact of your project be defined? Which indicators can be used to measure the impact of your work?
8th Nov – Pitch Workshop
The title says it all: you will learn about what an effective pitch consists of – both in theory and practice.
Final Presentations
As Hack4Good is reaching its final phase, we would like to invite you to the closing event of the programme. We will come together at HG in lecture hall D 7.1 (Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich) and enjoy the project presentations. Six teams will present their work for the non-profit organisations BASE, Helvetas, IDMC, IMPACT Initiatives, OECD, and WWF.
You will learn about the objectives of the projects, the challenges faced on the way, and, of course, how the teams leveraged their data science skills to support non-profit organisations and create real-world impact. We will conclude the evening with a relaxing apéro, which gives you a chance to chat and network. The event plus apéro take approximately 2 hours.
Project Closing
After eight weeks, you and your team will hand over your product to the non-profit organisation. The developed code will be open-source and uploaded to a git repository together with your documentation. Each of the participants will receive a certificate of participation. Finally, you get to celebrate your achievement with your fellow participants and all engaged parties in a social event. Get to know each other and have fun!