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Digital signage connects cross-continental hackathon

At this year's international Amdocs OSS Hackathon 2015, digital signage played a key role in unifying a single competition across three continents, keeping competitors from each hackathon site abreast of the competition and allowing them to vote on each other's work.

July 31, 2015

By Matthew Harper, Contributing Writer, Digital Signage Today

At this year's international Amdocs OSS Hackathon 2015, digital signage played a key role in unifying a single competition across three continents.

The hackathon, a summit of sorts for technology experts to come together and create new software, was held simultaneously in Israel, India and the U.K. by Amdocs, one of Israel's largest software companies — and digital signage kept competitors from each hackathon site abreast of the competition and allowed them to vote on each other's work.

Amdocs deployed digital signage from NoviSign for the OSS Hackathon to keep the competitors in those three countries apprised of the action simultaneously, while also allowing the attendees to communicate with each other and share news and progress updates, according to a recent NoviSign case study. The hackathon allowed experts across the globe to collaborate with fellow attendees to create new technology. While the event lasted only two days, it was intense and challenged attendees to create a working software prototype that could be tested, marketed and easily managed — all in a single day.

Amdocs deployed the digital signage solution to accompany the competition and provide an interactive, social media "wrapper," according to NoviSign. The digital signage solution provided real-time content sharing on large-format screens using social networks (Instagram and Twitter) as well as an interactive voting system for the final stage of the competition. At the end of the event, attendees voted on the software using QR codes on digital signage, with the real-time results displayed on-screen.

On the first day of the hackathon, the competitors were hard at work behind closed Amdocs doors. However, photo slideshows generated by the NoviSign social walls application shared high-definition images that the teams had taken of themselves and uploaded to Instagram with the hashtag "#OssHton2015." Scattered throughout hackathon locations, NoviSign screens also allowed real-time content sharing between the teams using social networks such as Twitter.

On the second day, the competitors voted on which software they considered the best. After scanning a QR code on a NoviSign digital signage display, voters were sent to a secure website and instructed to choose one piece of technology created during the hackathon that they liked the most. The results were continually updated on displays located in the three countries' hackathon locations, and the winner was announced just 10 minutes after polling closed.

Despite the distance barrier, digital signage helped connect the hackathon's competitors through social media sharing, hashtag use and real-time polling — and at the same time allowed competitors to create technology together and share their progress with other teams.

Watch a video about the OSS Hackathon from NoviSign below: