At the first PoliTech hackathon at the TUM Campus Heilbronn, students worked on solutions to real challenges facing public administration. The organizer and founder of Public Makers, Florian Stupp, provides insights into the varied day at the urban innovation hub (uih!).
The 20-year-old Information Engineering student has long been committed to democratic values. The hackathon was a joint project between the TUM Campus Heilbronn, Public Makers and Nexus Politics. The young computer scientist was happy about the students' great commitment: “We had 40 students in 10 teams – it exceeded our initial expectations.” The challenges came from Nexus Politics, a democracy platform. “All the participants were strongly committed, put a lot of energy into the challenges, and the results that came out in the end are incredibly impressive.”
Digitalization Is Key
Most participants came from the TUM Campus Heilbronn. However, Florian also reports that there were mixed teams of students from TUM and Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences. Together with the ‘Public Makers,’ he founded an organization that aims to show students how remote innovation can succeed in the public sector and what role digitalization plays in this. “The state, in the form of the administration, is where contact is first established. This is where dissatisfaction with our democracy very often arises.” After the welcome, the teams independently assigned themselves to the challenges for which they had the appropriate skill set.
They were tough: In the first challenge, the students had to develop an overview and political mapping of citizens' concerns. The teams in the second challenge designed a political “heat map” for problem visualization with filter function. Finally, the task was to design an early warning system to predict emerging problems. After eight hours, it was time for the pitches. Each team had three minutes to present their solution. The jury, consisting of Christoph Waffler from NexusPolitics and Jan Bastian from TUM Venture Labs, had the thankless task of selecting the three winners from the ten ideas.
To Be Continued
The teams' creativity was also reflected in their names: ‘GovGuide’ triumphed in the citizen concerns category. ‘Diversity Wins Hackathons’ won the “heat map” challenge, and ‘die Oskars’ impressed with their concept for an early warning system. ‘Die Oskars’ are using machine learning to analyze data and identify the problems of tomorrow. It is now up to NexusPolitics to decide how the ideas will be incorporated into product development. A follow-up to the hackathon is likely. Florian says: “We are currently talking to various players on the education campus and in the Heilbronn ecosystem about how to move forward.”