After the tremendous success of last year’s inaugural Zurich Hackathon, we decided to go for an “encore” this year. Our goal was to raise awareness, engagement and networking around Green IT and the environmental impact of technology, through hands-on application of best practices. 🌱
And what a day it was! The Zürich Hackathon by ClimateAction.tech took place on Friday May 23rd and was packed with energy, good vibes, and amazing ideas. We had more participants than last year (we even needed a waitlist) and saw great traction on all challenges. 💡
The event was organized by a dedicated team of volunteers from the CAT community, with some veterans from last year and some brand new to the hackathon game: Fiona Leibundgut, Richard Ekwall, Stefan Aeschbacher, Christian Abegg, Ken Iseli, Panu Kärävä, Rémy Baudelet, Thomas Trienbacher, Sébastien Abeillé, Jeffrey Belt, Marina Groepel and Oleg Lavrovsky. We also got some last-minute help from Debra Hevenstone, Dominik Grob and Martin Valdevenito at the Berner Fachhochschule for the team matching.
Event
50 green tech enthusiasts from all over Switzerland and even beyond, came together to hack! We prepared five challenges grouped into two tracks: Mobilize – influencing positive change around Green IT, – and Build – improving existing open source or Green IT tools.
A week before the hackathon, we matched participants to seven teams and held an online meet-and-greet event where everyone got to know each other and familiarize themselves with the project they’d work on. The hackathon day itself was short and intense: we kicked off at 9am, with all teams really hitting the ground running; and by 5pm, the day was over, the project presentations were done and we were amazed at the progress and innovation huge impact the participants had made had in just a few hours. 🙌
The event took place at Google Zürich and we were supported by three fantastic sponsors: Resilio, SparkIT and SwissDevJobs. We extend them all a heartfelt thank you. The event wouldn’t have been possible without their support.
Now, to the challenges!
Team Projects
We wanted to match the participants’ diverse set of interests and skills with a variety of challenges and encourage them to think of Green IT in their context, whether through organisational culture change, technical implementations or process improvements.
Teams had the option to work on:
- Mobilize
- Develop a quick-start-guide for Green IT in your office/team/company
- Develop a sustainability checklist for IT projects
- Develop an approach to convince your management of the key actions to reduce your IT emissions
- Build
- “Greenify” your preferred open source tool
- Improve an existing Green-IT tool
In just one day, the teams developed impressive results, from submitting useful bug fixes on open source tools, to developing a prototype platform to simplify sustainability in IT projects. Each team had three minutes to present their outcomes, you can take your time reading about their findings in their decks below:
Build track: MiniBTree StoreODO 🌱
Enabled an open-source database tool to shift operations to greener times by integrating live and forecasted carbon intensity data.
Build track: EcoIndex UX Redesign 🧪
Suggest a new layout for the www.ecoindex.fr tool with a dashboard-style layout which should be simpler to understand metrics.
Build track: CodeCarbon Fix 🛠️
Submitted multiple pull requests to enhance the CodeCarbon tool’s usability by fixing a visual display issue and improving the documentation..
Mobilize track: Sustainability Checklist Prototype ✅
Launched an open-source prototype checklist to help teams integrate sustainability questions into IT project planning.
Mobilize track: Enterprise Sustainability Checklist 🏢
Created a tailored checklist with qualitative and quantitative criteria for sustainable software practices at ELCA, a Swiss IT firm.
Mobilize track: Emissions Pitch for Management 💼
Crafted a compelling pitch based on a fictional case to show how to quantify IT waste and build a strong reduction strategy, based on Resilio’s carbon emissions data.
Mobilize track: Quick-Start Guide to Green IT 🚀
Developed a 7-step guide to help SMEs kick-start their Green IT journey with cost savings, strategy updates, and impact alignment.
Voices from the hackathon
Jeffrey Koppanyi (participant):
I was lucky to be part of a brilliant team with diverse, complementary skillsets that came together to tackle the challenge of improving a “carbonAwareDataStore”. […] Through working efficiently and making smart decisions, by the end of the day we had turned a mock app in a language only one of us was familiar with into a working prototype!
Natali Kozlenkova (participant):
Thanks to events like this hackathon, we get the chance to rethink how technology can be more sustainable and responsible — and take real steps toward making that a reality. 🌱💡
Raka Adrianto (participant):
After a couple of user needs exploration, ideations, iterations, and prototyping, we presented an open-source prototype checklist to help IT project managers and sustainability leads integrate sustainability questions into their planning process.
Thomas Trienbacher (organizer):
From carbon-aware tooling to sustainability checklists, the teams delivered thoughtful, open-source solutions with real-world potential.
A note from the organizers
We again learned a lot from organizing this second edition. Some of our key takeaways this year were:
- start organizing early: we first met in January and had challenges ready by March, for a hackathon happening in May.
- pay attention to your communication: communicate often, be concise and precise.
- engage with the participants early-on and get their firm commitment: this avoids no-shows and helps with budgeting and logistics
- get as many logistic tasks (in particular team matching) done before the event: we only had one day for hacking, so help participants hit the ground running.
- work with great people. We had an awesome organizers team!
We also have a whole library of resources and templates. Furthermore, for this edition, we used a tool called Dribdat to present the challenges and record the teams’ progress: https://climateaction.dribdat.cc/event/1.
If you want to organize your own hackathon and need help or inspiration, feel free to reach out to Fiona Leibundgut, Richard Ekwall or any of the other Zurich organizers on Slack. To find out about any future events, follow Zurich Hackathon on LinkedIn. You can of course also re-use the challenges: they are all linked above. Let’s keep building Green IT!
