Tailor-made intelligence briefings for policymakers goal of next NGA hackathon

When the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency lands in Seattle for its next hackathon May 20-21, it will be looking for solutions that will help it improve content curation and provide national security decision makers with a customized user experience that improves decision-making abilities.

The two-day event is an opportunity for diverse teams of developers, product managers, data scientists, maketing and sales professionals, journalists and others with innovative minds and the skills to help NGA solve this particular problem, said Brian Wood, the agency’s Digital Attack Team lead.

“NGA still has lots of customers who require a printed compiliation of the day’s most relevant news,” said Wood. “The physical hand-off means we lose out on much of what modern content curation technology can do for us.”

Figuring out how to deliver customized content for a specialized user — similar to online music streaming services — could help the agency provide more relevant, intuitive, briefing books for national security decision makers.

“Personalized music services automatically recommend music based on your previous interest selections,” explained Wood. “Our twist is that we’re curating content for people who don’t interact with the system directly. So, how do we curate for the curators?”

The winning solution will receive a cash award of $10,000 from NGA and the first runner-up will receive $1,000.

Prior to the hackathon, registered participants will have access to code for a content curation prototype developed by NGA via the agency’s GitHub site.

NGA will also have subject matter experts on hand throughout the event to answer content and coding-related questions from hackathon participants.

Source: NGA