Working within constraints is an important skill of any good product designer. At a hackathon, your constraints include time, of course, as well as available data, resources and the knowledge and skill of your team members. I try to join diverse groups that include at least one person who understands the underlying subject matter and available data, one strong open source developer and one designer/researcher type (usually that’s me). If you use and understand open source data and tools you likely have access to more resources than other teams, so unless the hackathon is restricted to proprietary tools and data, it gives you an edge.
Recently I have been mentoring at hackathons for Essteem Equalithon, primarily and for other organizations outside the UX and design fields to expand the understanding of and importance of design strategy. Hackathon projects I’ve participate in (I try to do at least one per year):
Capital One and Nasdaq hosted a financial betterment hackathon where I participated remotely as a product design advisor.
MD5 Escape from New York: Mass Evacuation Hackathon
Advisor and design mentor for teams working on solutions to a hypothetical evacuation from NYC. This Defense Department Hackathon featured $45k in awards.
Crowdsourcing Stormwater Solutions: Design-a-thon
I hosted a service design hackathon in October 2018 with the goal to encourage private property owners to implement Stormwater mitigation technology. (links to meetup page)
Empathy Jam 2017 was a one-day UX Design hackathon, held on October 28 at Fordham University.
UN Unite for Humanity Hackathon
I co-chaired a weekend hackathon in 2016 with the goal to create anti terrorist projects. The winning project employed machine learning to disrupt terrorist networks. Other submitted projects included a stateless e911 network and a SMS based marketplace for emergency supplies.
Second Screen, aka P.I.T.C.H.Y. D.A.W.G., is a platform for sharing related media synced with audio.
A brief tutorial of Wikipedia editing at the OWASP NYC Hackathon and (mini)Project Summit.
Musapaedia: NYPL Open Book Hackathon 2015
Musapaedia performs a brief interview and creates a custom book of poems, based on user preferences.
NYPL Open Book Hackathon: PDF to Reflowable ePUB Format
Let It Flow: converting PDF documents of Supreme Court slip opinions to reflowable EPUB format.