Humanitarian Innovation Hackathon 2026

Registrations are open for the 2026 Humanitarian Innovation Hackathon at the University of Sydney, 17 to 19 July. Teams of undergraduate students will work world problems. There are prizes, but as with any hackerthon it is about learning to work together. I have volunteered to mentor. This will be my third time mentoring a hackerthon this year.

Humanitarian Computing Scholarship

"I want to inspire students to look at how
they can better the world
through the application of technology,"

Since 2013 I have been funding a Humanitarian Computing Prize for students of the Australian National University. This has now been endowed on a permanent basis. So I was thinking of offering funds for some form of Humanitarian Computing Scholarship. This would be for a student undertaking a project with tangible outcomes which would improve the human condition through computing.

As an example of humanitarian computing, I assisted with the award winning Sahana free open source disaster management system. More recently I proposed "Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific", to deliver low cost micro-credentials via mobile phones (Worthington, 2018). ANU already has a Humanitarian Engineering focus, but not the equivalent for computing. Occasionally I mentor social enterprises in the Innovation ACT competition and tutor humanitarian projects in ANU TechLauncher.  Any suggestions as to what or how would be welcome, examples of similar schemes, offers of funding, would be welcome.

I hope to get some ideas from the IEEE Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT) Australian workshop, 26 Jun 2020.

Reference

T. Worthington, "Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific," 2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE), Wollongong, Australia, 2018, pp. 861-865. doi: 10.1109/TALE.2018.8615183 URL https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE.2018.8615183