Yesterday evening the 4 day Hackathon for the russian "map of tomorrow" ended with a teambuilding of both teams and a beautifule new map.

The initially planned Hackathon with 30 people in the Kindland-Ecovillage in the west of Moscow needed to be switched to an Hybrid format due to the corona-travel-restrictions, so 15 German Hackers and Mappers met in the slowtec-Cohousing-Project in Stuttgart. Both teams where connected via the open-source conferencing center run by wechange.

The participants came from Russia, Belarus, Germany and one from Iran.
A hackathon does not have a fix programm like any other conference but just a rough structure where the hackers can pic tasks and fulfill them. Every morning we met for an one hour update of the tasks and activities we did so people got oriented and we could priorize issues and build teams around them. Than we started hacking and every day you could feel how we dived deeper into issues, problems and came up with more and more solutions.
In the last minute before the final presentation on sunday the new website is born:

co-map.ru

Sunday evening both teams did rafting and climbing and enjoyed the shared succes.

It was a beautiful experience together. Even we could not meet in person, thanks to the digital environments, the feeling of collaboration between the Russian and German hackers where amazing. Its such a beautiful feeling to see, that on both sides, people are investing they time to bring a tool closer to perfect and making the future more resilient.

There is still a lot work going on, even after the Hackathon and people are finalizing their issues. The next step will be to organize 10 Mappathons in Russian cities, where we present the map to the change-movements and to the public and empower people to contribute mapping on this co-map!

This colaboration should last forever ; )
yours Helmut from the organizing team