Pardon me for my ignorance, but how exactly does a hackathon like this work? An how is it judged? Couldn't someone have already done all the work and then just pretend to complete it in the 24 hour period?
Hey twelfthnight, great questions - we'll look to include some of these answers in an FAQ on the site.
The hackathon will feature fairly exclusive datasets from our project partners, so it'll be tough for folks to do a bunch of work before the hackathon.
The actual hackathon will be groups working on problem prompts and datasets provided to us by our project partners and likely judged on creativity, practicality, technical brilliance, and use of data. A sample dataset and problem might be looking at a text database of escort ads to pull out pricing data (which is heavily masked in slang) to build a dynamic demand model. The goal would be to help Thorn (one of our partners) and investigators identify movement of child sex traffickers as it happens.
