

The Bayes Impact Hackathon - alexis
http://www.bayesimpact.org/hack

======
minimaxir
> _Grand Prize: Along with having their hack turned into a Bayes Impact
> project, staffed with full-time data scientists [...] meet and eat with
> legendary entrepreneurs_

If I'm reading this correctly, the _grand prize_ is having your project taken
from you and losing attribution? And the only reward the team gets in return
after hours of work is _breakfast, lunch, and dinner_?

If anyone could clarify the nature of the grand prize, I would appreciate it.

~~~
ajiang
Hi Max, of course - happy to clarify.

The question actually gets to something we believe in very strongly: real
impact on social problems takes focus and commitment. That's why we run a
full-time data science fellowship, rather than have volunteers. Many well
intentioned skill-based volunteer projects end without results, mainly because
at some point (usually when the work get boring or hits an obstacle)
volunteers lose momentum. Having full-time fellows allows us to bring really
smart people to a great idea and have them fully dedicated to seeing things
through, from scoping to implementation and maintenance.

Most hackathons projects (especially the ones for social good) usually don't
get continued beyond the event. We've seen this to be true, both from our own
experiences at hackathons and from others. We don't want that to happen at
ours, especially with such incredible civic and nonprofit organization
partners. That's why we're using our own resources to dedicate 2 of our
fellows, full-time, in continuing on the winning hack. We want to ensure that
the great work done for social impact doesn't get lost post-hackathon.

Of course, if the winning team wishes to continue on their for-good project
with our project partners, we'd love that and would do nothing to stop it. I
guarantee you that we're not trying to take attribution from participants, but
rather want to give teams the opportunity to see their weekend hack come to
life.

~~~
minimaxir
That helps clarify things. Thanks!

------
twelfthnight
Pardon me for my ignorance, but how exactly does a hackathon like this work?
An how is it judged? Couldn't someone have already done all the work and then
just pretend to complete it in the 24 hour period?

~~~
ajiang
Hey twelfthnight, great questions - we'll look to include some of these
answers in an FAQ on the site.

The hackathon will feature fairly exclusive datasets from our project
partners, so it'll be tough for folks to do a bunch of work before the
hackathon.

The actual hackathon will be groups working on problem prompts and datasets
provided to us by our project partners and likely judged on creativity,
practicality, technical brilliance, and use of data. A sample dataset and
problem might be looking at a text database of escort ads to pull out pricing
data (which is heavily masked in slang) to build a dynamic demand model. The
goal would be to help Thorn (one of our partners) and investigators identify
movement of child sex traffickers as it happens.

------
Cynddl
I thought that websites forbidding selection and right-click were a thing of
the past, I was wrong.

~~~
miahi
They are not actually forbidding selection, just hiding it. If you blindly
select text you will see that copy/paste works - at least in Firefox.

