THE Port, a safe space where ideas, expertise and the challenges facing the world can come to together and, driven by the needs of those living with the challenges, be tackled with new perspectives and innovative solutions. Taking problems identified by field staff working in humanitarian areas, we aim to bring technical expertise to help solve humanitarian challenges and get promising solutions to a usable prototype during a 60 hour sprint, that we call hackathon.

Geneva, Switzerland

For many int. organisations innovation means utilising the latest technology available on the market. Those tools are not always usable in the fields due to functionality, limited maintenance capacities and availability of spare parts. Therefore those tools do not fit the need of field workers.
This is exactly where we see our core challenge: finding need-owners with the desire for change and develop together with them a suitable tool to address urgent humanitarian issues of our time.

Our methodology brings a variety of backgrounds around a challenge. It gives IOs the possibility to explore their need from a different viewpoint. Current solutions, processes and procedures will be questioned by the hackathon teams. Each team member is a leading expert in their own field, but have never heard about the problem, they are asked to tackle during our hackathon events. The team thus needs to be guided through decades of development. Thus we make the concerns of field workers ours.

THE Port humanitarian, technology oriented hackathon has been successfully run three times since 2014 with now 20 challenges. In 2016 we are aiming at tackling 6 different challenges proposed by IOs or NGOs that are aiming at improving the lives of effected people and we can show our responsibility to act. We will group 6 diverse teams around the challenges and foster collaboration amongst the teams to build tangible prototypes within a short time frame of 60 hours.

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Beneficiaries are different actors in the humanitarian field: On one hand it is the huge group of field workers that in many occasions work under difficult circumstances and need tailored tools to overcome their day-to-day challenges and create more impact on effected populations. There is also the aid-receiving local population in conflicts, disasters or situations of chronic poverty and deprivation. They need efficient and fast help to overcome the most pressing issues to become self-reliant.

THE Port humanitarian hackathons is the first bringing together well prepared humanitarian field needs collected from members of International Organisations and humanitarian NGOs with hand-picked leading experts from different work-backgrounds. Our specialties are highly interdisciplinary teams which are formed by a throughout selection process. We are composing highly balanced teams in in terms of gender, expertise, national and cultural background.

18k EUR personnel costs (in-kind); 34.7k EUR participant accommodation & catering; 12 k EUR participant travel support, 9k EUR location rent

Ways to increase participation from under represented groups. Offers of collaboration. New ways to approach our challenges!