Smogathon, last year’s an anti-smog hackathon, is turning into a Smogathon Bootcamp on Nov 26-27. What they’re aiming at is fighting the pollution and plan to give a $100.000 to the winner of the bootcamp.
Team Leader Maciej Rys is a graduate of University of York, University of Hong Kong and Kozminski University (Warsaw). He is the cofounder of many technological ventures such as Przedszkolowo or EarlyLogic as well as strategic consultant at PMR.
Communications and Marketing Manager Anna Rys has been involved in the Krakow startup community for over five years. She is currently a Business Developer for a group of startups developing innovative solutions in the area of B2C, C2C and human-machine communication (think omnichannel platforms and AI/NLP). The was previously co-founder and CEO of TurboTranslations. Passionate about healthy lifestyle… and breathing clean air.
Project Manager Kamila Knap is soon-to-be-graduate with an MA in Law from Jagiellonian University. She’s managing partner at Legal Concept, an advisory company for e-commerces, creative companies and start ups. She’s experienced in organizing events and advising early stage companies.
Project Coordinator Maciej Ujejski is the Founding Director of The Flying Mind Foundation and Partner of the Center for Leadership, where he is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Leadership Academy for Poland. Between 2012-2015, he coordinated the Youth in Leadership project – a nationwide conference focused on the development of youth leadership and social entrepreneurship. Previously he worked for a mobile software house CocoLab where he served as a COO and Project Owner.
Last year’s Smogathon. was a spur of a moment decision. Maciej and Anna Rys decided to fight with the terrible air quality around them with their strongest weapon – tech. Hearing – and seeing – the dire situation of Cracow, in less than 5 weeks they managed to organise an anti-smog hackathon. This year they’re going bigger and they’re giving Smogathon’s participants much more support and better prizes. We’ve already featured one of the projects who participated in last year’s edition: Airly, which is now valued at about 5 million PLN.
Nov 26-27 they’re organizing Smogathon Bootcamp, which is a “tougher” version of what they did last year. 25 projects will be selected to participate in the Bootcamp. “It’s also going to last 24 hours but during that time the teams invited for the event will go through sort of a… mentoring hell (we call it “de-mentoring”). Some of the greatest minds in the area of startups, business, technology, marketing, law, etc. – will question and constructively criticise the projects, so that at the end of the event, only the best and most determined teams remain.”
The top 10 teams will go on to the Grand Finale at Kijów Centrum on November 28. The Grand Finale will gather an audience of over 800 people, including mentors, jury, media, investors and Smogathon’s partners (companies willing to implement at least some of the projects). The last and final task of each team will be to present their improved project; just present it themselves, no Q&A. The winners get 100,000 PLN for developing their project and all of the teams will have the opportunity to talk to potential business partners and investors as well as get some additional prizes.
