Story

One day, together with my dearest friend, Kacper Rzosiński, we felt we needed something refreshing from everyday mundane job duties. That’s when I saw a Facebook ad of a Hackathon “Nowa Strona Danych”, led by one of the Ministry of Digital Affairs departments. It launched a new portal with easy-accessible open national data – dane.gov.pl, and looked for its’ implementation ideas. The initiative seemed as a true challenge – something we both desired.

Solution

After assembling a team, and registering it as Alpacabana – we tackled one of the proposed topics: raw data visualization. We decided to do it with an intriguing twist: creating informative charts for citizens suffering from vision impairments. Quite a hard nut to crack, isn’t it? After 2 days of brainstorming and consulting with domain experts, we came up with mockups, being in-alignment with WCAG guidelines, and presented our PoC solution successfully to the broader audience.

Alpacabana Squad

Lesson Learned

Unfortunately, to our surprise: our spark of bright ideas didn’t catch on the Hackathon Committee. But that’s fine – most importantly, together we have successfully solved an urgent problem and created a viable, down-to-earth mockup solution to mitigate it. To our minds, it was more important than any promised winnable financial award.