This year’s Call for Code hackathon will focus on climate change and rally developers to come up with innovative solutions to one of humanity’s biggest challenges.
Call for Code was created by David Clark Cause in partnership with IBM. Other major partners include the UN Human Rights Office and the Linux Foundation.
“Technology is the catalyst for scaling solutions to global problems – from climate change to humanitarian issues, and even the global pandemic,” said Ruth Davis, Director of Call for Code at IBM.
“IBM along with Call for Code and these ecosystem partners are dedicated to taking on the complex challenge of sustainability and encourage problem-solvers around the world to take part.”
Additional organisations supporting this year’s event include Arrow Electronics, Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative University, Clemson University, Esri, EY, Ingram Micro, Intuit, Morgan Stanley, New Relic, Persistent Systems, Teach For All, UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, and many others.
The hackathon is now in its fifth year and has created a community of more than half a million developers, students, and problem-solvers across 180 nations.
Participants can use some of the world’s most powerful tools to solve some of its biggest problems including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM LinuxOne Community Cloud from IBM zSystems and IBM Blockchain, as well as APIs from IBM’s The Weather Company.
This year’s event has been selected as the innovation platform for the ‘Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Alliance’—designed to be one of the largest public-private climate partnerships in the world. The alliance is keen to frame climate change as much as a human rights crisis as an environmental catastrophe.
“From rising sea levels, extreme weather events, wildfires, and droughts, to food insecurity, health impacts, mass migrations, and increasing global conflict, there is no denying that climate change is a humanitarian crisis,” said Bill Stark, Chief Impact Officer of the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Alliance.
“With its global reach and history of success over the years, we’re excited to work with Call for Code, as it has proven to be the gold standard when it comes to engaging developers around the world to innovate for social good.”
Any budding participant should begin thinking about what particular sustainability challenge they want to tackle. After building a team, they can register here and get to work on creating their solution to improve the Earth’s long-term prognosis.
The Grand Prize winner of this year’s event will receive $200,000 along with solution implementation support from IBM Ecosystem partners.
“As the Global Challenge opens today, we’re excited to utilise our expansive platform to help people in need by calling on developers worldwide to innovate software that can mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change through sustainable solutions,” said David Clark, CEO of David Clark Cause and Creator of Call for Code.
Call for Code kicks off today (26 April 2022) and the deadline for submissions is 31 October 2022.
