Report on the hackathon team Navalny

    I work in the IT department of the campaign headquarters for the registration of Alexei Navalny as a candidate for the presidential election in Russia in 2018. We have a small staff of developers, but resources are not always enough to implement all interesting projects and generate fresh ideas.

    Hackathon team Navalny

    Therefore, on July 26, we announced a hackathon to create products and tools to help the campaign and its volunteers.

    We asked all those involved in the creation of IT-projects to propose their project ideas, and those who did not have them - offered their own. Over 2 weeks, more than 100 applications arrived, the vast majority - from developers. Here are the number of applications mentioning various languages ​​/ technologies:

    Python - 27
    JavaScript - 18
    C / C ++ / C # - 17
    Java - 16
    PHP - 11
    Swift / Objective-C - 7
    NodeJS - 4
    Ruby - 3
    Scala - 3
    Go - 2
    Assembler - 1

    This distribution pleased us, because our main stack is Python (Django) and JavaScript (jQuery, React).

    We gathered all the participants in a general chat in Telegram in advance and started discussing projects and searching for teams. As a result, when on Saturday, August 12, 57 people came to our Moscow and St. Petersburg headquarters, almost all of them already knew with whom and what task they would work, and some even prepared small prototypes. There were 19 teams in total, which within 2 days realized their ideas on how they can help the campaign.

    Throughout the hackathon, the leaders of our IT team and invited experts advised the participants and helped them choose the best solutions. In the final, the teams talked about what they did and showed their prototypes, and the jury (the head of the campaign headquarters Leonid Volkov , FBK director Roman Rubanov , FBK creative director Elena Marus , IT consultant Vladislav Zdolnikov and UX expert Alexei Kopylov ) called 3 winning projects. They became the Bulk Live application, a virtual call center and Telegram-CEC .

    Hackathon

    Here is a short description of these and other interesting hackathon projects. Links to the github are included, so if any project interests you, you can always join and help the participants to bring it to the end.

    • The Bulk Live application allows you to listen to live streaming from our YouTube channel and recordings. The team managed to set up a server ready to receive an RTMP stream from the studio and distribute it to users, api for receiving broadcast metadata and an iOS application.
    • A virtual call center (or, as we call it, “Cloud Dialer”) is a system through which each volunteer can call a voter and agitate him to vote for our candidate. She will also show the user the proposed conversation scenario for headquarters. It is based on the Asterisk computer telephony system.
    • Telegram-CEC is a logical development of the project of the Voice Association SMS-CEC . It will allow, through a telegram bot, to collect preliminary election results from observers, as well as to collect a single database of violations and monitor the situation on election day throughout the country on a map in real time.

      image
      navalny-observer.herokuapp.com

    • The bot detector determines from a comment from any social network the probability that its author is an inhabitant of Olgino . We plan to actively use it in the fight for the cleanliness of the Internet.
    • The pod-bypass map is a door-to-door agitation system. It shows the campaign coverage of each region and district, allows the volunteer to sign up to bypass a specific entrance and report on the work done through a telegram bot.
    • On the Navalny Answer site, everyone can find a video answer from our candidate to their question, add a question that has not yet been asked, or a video with an answer that has not yet been added.
    • In the Pulse application, participants propose implementing the “ Red Button ” functionality , notifying all our supporters in a small radius around the user that something is happening to him (both good and unpleasant) and inviting to join.

    We will continue to work with these and other teams after the hackathon and will try to release them as soon as possible for widespread use. We want to thank those who participated and helped us organize everything, as well as invite everyone to join the projects already started and the future hackathons of our campaign.

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