Coding to relieve disaster – FloodHack a major success!

The concept was simple – gather talented developers, give them 24 hours and a noble cause – create apps which can organise people and resources to help fix the damages of the recent Balkan floods.

Belgrade’s Flood Hackaton, held this weekend, offered Volunteering, Give and Help, React Now and Location as primary topics for problem-solving. The solution had to be original, stable and applicable for helping in different types of disasters. Around 50 developers had applied, splitting into 10 teams and coming up with some truly groundbreaking ideas.

The winning team, Super Volunteer from Novi Sad, developed an app which coordinates volunteers and provides precise, real-time information on where help is needed. Zoran Djekic, Borko Vasilev, Neven Kalakovic, and Milos Rujevic chose this topic because they saw that, during recent distastrous floods, some locations had too many volunteers, while others had only a few.

Super Volunteer helps people check where volunteer work is most needed at a particular time. It allows volunteers to apply and specify how much time they will spend on a trageted location. That way, the app serves as an information centre, a complete volunteering management and coordination tool.

A number of tech companies, including us, supported FloodHack in different ways and were committed to promoting the best apps. On our part, we offered teams to integrate A2P SMS notifications, 2-Way SMS and push notifications into their solutions, and our Nemanja Malisic was available via Skype and email for any kind of technical support during integration.

Congratulations to all the app creators and many thanks to the event organisation: Filip Ljubicic, Predrag Radenkovic, Ana Nikolic, Marko Dakic, and Marko Mitic. Here’s our toast to a group of friends and IT enthusiasts that came up with the whole idea and pulled it off in spectacular, charitable fashion!