Hackathon for culture

Icodex, a 24-hour marathon and the first hackathon for cultural innovation organised in Milan by Bookrepublic, has produced some interesting results. Such as a chatbot that creates cultural itineraries in real time and an app to help children to read.

A “marathon” for hackers, like the ones organised to come up with new software to resolve a company’s concrete problems. Only in this case the solutions being sought were not (just) technological.

This was a far more ambitious project: to hack, or rather explore less-travelled roads and devise innovative systems to “improve the way we think, create, deliver and consume cultural products”. Icodex, the first hackathon for cultural innovation, organised by Bookrepublic, an organisation that for some years has been promoting digital publishing in Italy, with support of the Cariplo Foundation, decided to use a formula from the computing world in order to attempt to create a fertile encounter between technology and culture that could give rise to actual projects and services. All in 24 hours of hard work (interspersed with breaks for yoga and anti-stress exercise) at the premises of Base in Milan.

“The question that we started with was very generic, unlike the typical style of a hackathon that is usually organised to address a specific problem”, explains Alessandro Rubini, head of the Cariplo Foundation’s project iC Innovazione Culturale. “The companies that organise these events usually become owners of all the solutions that are proposed. In our case though, the various creative teams keep ownership of their idea and can continue to work on it”.

Seven areas of interest were addressed in this unique event held in Milan: archives and libraries, visual arts, audio-visual, design, publishing, artistic-historic heritage, live performance. The first day involved a series of contributions, made in the interdisciplinary spirit that characterised the entire initiative: speakers included Gillian Ferrabee of Cirque du Soleil, Tobias Ahlin of Spotify, Brian Chang of Disney, Chiara Montanari of the Polytechnic, leader of the Antarctic expedition. After this opening session of scenarios and signposts, things moved onto the operative stage. The formula was based on the encounter between very different skill sets: developers, designers and creatives came together to work on the same idea, make it tangible and transform it into a viable enterprise.

“During the two days of Icodex we saw the formation of 14 teams, made up on average of 4 or 5 people – explains Alessandro Rubini. Given the rather generic request that it started with, the risk was that there would be too much time taken up in identifying the various problems to resolve and there would remain little time to work on the actual project. Instead the formula we chose functioned quite well: the teams were quickly established and the work, supervised by a team of “mentors” that worked alongside the participants, led to some decidedly interesting results”.

Among the solutions proposed, a successful blend of high-technology and services, was a software to make it easier to read Wikipedia for someone who is dyslexic, and a portal able to put artists in direct contact with galleries. There were two winning projects: the team Cicero received the award for the best idea with a chatbot that creates cultural itineraries in real time based on the personal profile of the user and the consultation of data available to all and the award for the best project went to the team Seven who developed the application “Lele” to help children to read that offers the option to connect the cursor of an e-book with listening to a recording of the mother’s voice.

Each of them received a prize of 3,000 euro and coaching to continue in the development of the project in such a way as to transform it into a real business. The next step – an invitation also valid for all the ideas developed in the 24 hours of Icodex – is to compete in the iC Innovazione Culturale competition run by Fondazione Cariplo, that offers funding of up to 100,000 Euros.

The competition is now into its third edition. The one recently concluded, the second, received over 700 proposals and the new non-profit companies that will receive support will be announced on 28 June.

Hackathon for culture

Icodex, a 24-hour marathon and the first hackathon for cultural innovation organised in Milan by Bookrepublic, has produced some interesting results. Such as a chatbot that creates cultural itineraries in real time and an app to help children to read.

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