The Bitrock Smart Hackathon 2023, organized in partnership with our sister company ProActivity, ended with an exclusive Pitching & Award Event at Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica in Milan. It was the perfect opportunity to meet the participants and spend some quality time with our colleagues, partners and clients.
The challenge
The hackathon challenge consisted in developing a smart tool to help employees that work remotely maintain social relations, stay motivated and collaborate with their colleagues.
The topic, i.e. how technology can enable and strengthen social bonds, attracted great interest. We are really satisfied with the achieved results: more than 150 registered people, 17 competing teams and a lot of inspirational and interesting hints concerning our topic.
The Winners
The final event was the icing on the cake, and we have to thank the hackathon’s organizing team, Mentors and Judges, who all contributed to the success of the event.
A special mention to our external Jury composed of Michela Bianchi, Chief of People and Sustainability Officer at Moneyfarm, Paolo Zilioli, Director IT Eyecare Systems at Luxottica and Federico Cella, journalist for Corriere della Sera, and our special host of the award ceremony.
For all those who couldn't be there, we would like to describe the winning projects that, more than others, have centered the hackathon aim: recovering human balance in a digital world.
The 1st classified team, the TATEAM (Niko Zarzani, Costanza Pollastrelli and Daniele Mariotto), won the hackathon with their App Workie-Talkie, a dynamic workspace where employees can effortlessly collaborate on projects, exchange knowledge, and foster strong relationships.
The mobile App offers several features that promote and reward positive behavior: it offers breaks with colleagues available at that moment, it allows you to create and participate in thematic rooms for conversations via voice chat, and earn points by interacting and receiving reactions. The app also offers advice on managing workspace and concentration, and promotes physical health with notifications for active breaks, stretching exercises and daily quizzes.
The 2nd team to stand on the podium was Team JM, with their innovative platform called Meetrock. A solution that combines new Social, Machine Learning and AI technologies to let you and your colleagues organize, join and enjoy a unique experience both inside and outside the office.
With Meetrock you can easily create any type of event you want and let other people join with zero effort and no spam emails. Once the event is finished, every participant can send a report about the organizer and other participants to let Bitrock HR know if anything went wrong, guaranteeing continuous improvement and making the event always better than the previous one.
The last project we want to talk about is Social Buddy Bot, developed from 42 Monkeys, ranked third at Bitrock Smart Hackathon.
Social Buddy Bot is an application that helps remote coworkers socialize. It’s integrated in the mainly used communication platforms and it uses AI to engage coworkers to do activities together.
The activity of users is analyzed and, based on interactions, the system interacts with them: in case of a low rate of interaction, the system asks if everything is ok, trying to make the participants interact with others. The aim of this bot is to make people more used to remote work interaction and, given the appropriate amount of time.
Taking stock of our first virtual hackathon, we are really happy to have organized this type of event… we don’t want to spoil too much, but stay tuned to discover the next news we have in store for you!
