As part of this year’s Activate Summit in London, the Guardian and Rewired State have partnered with Nokia and BlueVia to bring you (H)activate – a cause-led hack running at our headquarters in Kings Cross on the weekend of 18-19 June.
We would like to invite 80 hackers to come and spend the weekend with us. We want you to eat our food, spank our Wi-Fi and tap in to our network – humble us with your talent and brilliance on the Sunday afternoon. We will even eat cake while we watch you show us how you think technology might change the planet, demonstrating your cunning prototype while we cheer and tweet about how fabulous you are.
Afterwards we will feed you beer and pizza and winners will be awarded a veritable slew of prizes, including the following:
• a platform at the Activate Summit itself, to show off (again) your winning idea;
• a full-colour cartoon portrait of yourself as your favourite fictional character by Doctor Who artist Baxter;
• other prizes are being designed as we speak with the Engineers Without Borders, guaranteeing a reward that money just can’t buy – details will be announced in the coming weeks but we know that at least one prize involves the words “Hexayurt” and “yours to keep”.
Apps and prototypes that you build should ideally be:
• platform-agnostic if possible (although developing countries do rely heavily on mobile tech, natch);
• anything that would make a difference – seriously, if you can argue the case for its value to a roomful of your peers and us, then we believe you;
• useful for domestic (UK based) issues and/or the developing world: we want to focus on home as much as overseas.
If you would like to apply for a place on this weekend, please use the sign-up form over at Rewired State and we will get back to you as soon as we have finished with our big green and red pens – but if you are good, you are in.
We have capped it at 80. However if there are a few stragglers that we just can’t say no to, then we will just slice the bread more thinly and pop to the shops to get more snackage as and when necessary.
We will have coffee, tea and the Soda Stream on full alert from 10am Saturday through to final coding whistle – promise.
For those of you who don’t know, Activate is the Guardian’s platform for people working with the internet and its associated technologies, to change the world for the better. If you are keen to know more about Activate visit www.guardian.co.uk/activate
Emma Mulqueeny works on the Guardian’s Open Platform and heads the Guardian Developer Network. She also runs Rewired State and Young Rewired State developer networks, developer events and hack days.