Cohesion Hackathon - Barking and Dagenham

Join Digilab and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham for a weekend like no other – the chance to come together and, in teams, try and tackle some of the most important challenges of our time – strengthening social cohesion in Barking and Dagenham. Participants with a range of perspectives and diverse backgrounds are invited to come together to form teams and define a specific ‘problem’ relating to social cohesion and workshop solutions in a sprint-style. Examples of problems teams could choose to focus on could include (but are not limited to): 

• improve relations between community and police
• solutions to challenge perceptions of public safety
• ways to bring people together across the borough
• ways to encourage reporting of hate crime 

With a clearly defined problem, participants will brainstorm ‘hacks’ to develop innovative solutions. Solutions can be digital or non-digital but should focus on building social cohesion. Groups will be lightly guided through an ‘ideation’ phase where they will come up with ideas, a prototype phase where ideas will be tested (in the real world) and then pitch to a judging panel made up of leading experts in the field of social cohesion, technology, innovation and service design. Expert mentors will also be on hand to support teams through the design process. 

£150 Prize for the winning team kindly sponsored by TEB Builders. 

Tips:

Use the real world as your test bed for your ideas – test your problem statement, test your target audience, test, test, test (use Barking market)!

Keep asking why! 

Use a design process to shape your thinking, get some ideas and inspiration here.