Calendar – Past Event

POV (Point of View), the award-winning independent documentary series celebrating its 25th anniversary on PBS this year, is reaching out to documentary filmmakers with projects at any stage of production for the first POV Hackathon, taking place Saturday and Sunday, August 11-12, 2012, in New York City.

The weekend is an opportunity for filmmakers with a digital vision to work with developers and designers to create a finished prototype—be it a web app, mobile tool, game or something we've never seen before—for the web.

What Is a Hackathon?

POV's Hackathon is inspired by the "hack days" of the open-source development community and companies such as Facebook and Google. In a traditional hackathon, software coders collaborate outside of the usual corporate constraints in compressed time frames to solve a problem.

With POV's Hackathon, we're adding independent producers into the mix, adding their creativity and expertise in social-issue storytelling. POV will pair five filmmakers with developers based on their Hackathon applications.

Once matched, the teams will participate in a pre-Hackathon orientation session to prepare media (video, photos, data) and make decisions about software and tools. Then, over two days, the teams will work together to produce a working prototype.

Key Dates
May 31, 2012: Call for Participants opens
June 29, 2012: Call for Participants closes
July 20, 2012: Participants are notified of selection
August TBD: Participant orientation
August 11-12, 2012: POV Hackathon