About Bigas2Hack

The Bigas2Hack - the sequel to last year's highly successful Bigas Hackathon- is an event for hacktivists and programming aficionados who are willing to use their much-in-demand skills to benefit the world.

IRRI's hackathons bring together young IT whizzes to spend two days developing an IT-based solution to a rice research question. Last year's event involved 57 from the Philippines. This year, the plan is to engage more people from the Philippines and beyond.

PhilRobotics, the winning team in 2012, came up with Envilog, a portable device that can take readings of temperature, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, amount of sunlight, atmospheric pressure, humidity, and water level in rice fields.

Bigas2Hack returns as part of the activities lined up by IRRI for rice-sector development and in celebrating 2012 as the National Year of Rice.

This year's hackathon will more formally allow interested participants to incubate their ideas longer, and then take them further by developing prototypes.

Challenges for this year are categorized into

• Problems that can be worked on within 48 hours of the event duration and without prior preparation, and

• Problems that hacktivists will be working on already for an extended period of time prior to the event.

Hackers who are interested in working on problems within 48 hours of the event will be provided with data that can be plugged in relatively easily to complete their market.