Apps for Ag Hackathon at Cabrillo College

Apps for Ag is a series of agriculture focused hackathons. Our purpose is to bring together the seemingly disparate worlds of software development and commercial farming into a collaborative event. Our mission is to develop useful technology to address the needs of today’s grower.

The series will travel throughout the agricultural production areas of California and beyond. We welcome developers with diverse backgrounds, levels of experience and specialties to our events.This event is hosted by Cabrillo College in Watsonville, CA on March 12th-13th, 2016 at the Solari Green Technology Center.

Hackathons are a time tested Silicon Valley tradition. The purpose is not at all to "hack" into computer systems for malicious purposes. Rather, the term is based on the positive connotation of the word "hack": to write clever software programs that solve an old problem in a new and optimal way.

Hackathons are typically 24-48 hours long and are an endurance challenge of ideation, iteration, collaboration and focus. Participants will put in long hours, some don't even sleep as they rush to develop as much of the concept as possible before judging. The event culminates in a judged contest, or "Pitchfest". The makeup of the judging panel reflects all of the respective industry stakeholders. It will include experienced growers, software engineers, entrepreneurs and investors. Judges are asked to rate each team on 1.) the impact of the concept, 2.) a compelling story of collaboration and 3.) the technical merit of the concept.

Participating growers benefit by giving voice to their needs and possibly receiving a purpose-built software application to address them. They also get to observe what software development looks like, to see how challenging it can be, to learn a new vocabulary, to try something different and to discover many commonalities with another industry.

Developers benefit by showing off their skills, networking within their industry, obtaining domain expertise in a new industry, learning about the technology that already exists in agriculture and, ideally, making a productive impact on the Nation's food chain.

The Apps for Ag hackathons are organized so that each team has at least one member to represent each of the following categories; a software engineer, an entrepreneur, a grower / agriculturalist and a designer. The participants on a team each own the intellectual property (IP) that they create at the hackathon equally. No outside organization has rights to the IP (including employers, Universities and host organizations), unless the team collectively agrees to transfer it. Teams form ad hoc at the start of the event, so it is a great opportunity for everyone to expand their comfort zone and to meet new people from diverse backgrounds. The Apps for Ag organizing team facilitates this mixing.

Current Prize levels:

1st place team: $5000 cash

2nd place team: $3000 cash

3rd place teams $1000 cash