Food security, regional stability emphasis of NGA’s Los Angeles-area hackathon

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is scheduled to hold its second hackathon event of 2017, March 25-26 in Los Angeles, CA.

The two-day event will bring together local innovators, industry, small businesses and academia to tackle a food security scenario based on a 2015 global food security assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“Food security and regional stability are hugely important issues to the intelligence community because they act as threat multipliers, aggravating existing problems such as political instability and regional tensions,” said U.S. Air Force Capt. Adam Satterfield, NGA’s lead for crowd sourced-driven innovation. “We are asking participants to use geospatial information to better understand, model, visualize and monitor that nexus between food security and regional stability.”

Hackathon participants will have opportunities to meet with NGA recruiters and industry representatives and receive briefings from NGA experts. NGA will have subject matter experts on hand throughout the event to answer content-related questions from hackathon participants.

The event culminates in final “pitches” addressing the challenge from the participating teams. The winner will receive a cash award of $3,000, and the first runner-up will receive an award of $1,000.

“Challenges and hackathons reach beyond traditional federal government and defense partners and expose NGA to previously untapped innovative thinkers,” said Satterfield.

NGA’s next hackathon is scheduled for Seattle, Washington, May 21-22, 2017 and will focus on crowdsourcing for information collection and distribution.