The second weekend of October myself and a band of Qlik developers teamed up with some of the top students in Ottawa for this year’s deCODE Hackathon.
The Challenge
But what challenge should our team tackle? After some discussion with Qlik’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) team, we decided the coolest thing for our team to work on would be the Data Competition that the United Nations had at The Oceans Conference in June. As part of this competition, “participants were encouraged to use their imagination to produce visualizations that highlight insights from all the 1,380 voluntary commitments available in The Ocean Conference Registry of Voluntary Commitments.” The overall goal? #SAVEOUROCEAN.
The Work
With our challenge selected, it was time to get to work. We gave the students access to the data with Qlik Playground, taught them Qlik’s APIs and let them dive in…
And boy did they impress us. The first thing I was impressed by was how quickly the students not only learned the Qlik APIs, but how quickly they realized the power of it.
When they learned that they didn’t have to bother with keeping the state of their selections, but simply make a selection call and let the Qlik Associative Engine handle all the data updating — they were blown away. They definitely put that power to use…and quickly in true hackathon style.
The Awesome Results
Over the span of just 22 hours the team brought together an awesome page that not only showed off the data, but allowed the individual user to find the answers themselves by filtering based on country, company, target —pretty much whatever they wanted.
This project even recently made a United Nation’s Ocean Action Newsletter (under Updates from Voluntary Commitments). We’re so incredibly proud of this team, especially the hardworking and eager students. This is well-deserved.
So where is this awesome visualization? Check out the Qlik Playground Showcase and view the “UN Our Oceans Challenge” project.
And how can you help us with this important initiative? If you want to get involved or play with the code yourself, the project is open sourced on GitHub as well.
Enjoy! And let us know what you think in the comments.
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