In Quebec City (Canada), a unique Geo Challenge-Hackathon event will be held just before one of the major GIS events in North America. This event, called Défi GéoHack (French or English language), is based on traditional hackathons for developers, integrators, cartographers, students, etc. with a mix of challenges submitted by sponsors focusing on GIS and web standards. This event is supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium or OGC.

This one-day activity organised by passionate volunteers will happen before the opening days of Geoconference in October. The Hackathon will be constrained to use geospatial open data, web standards and GIS / web tools. Real problems will be submitted by sponsors on different themes such as health, public safety, culture, transportation, environment, smart cities/government and others.

For the first edition, real world problems were submitted by a media organisation (CBC/Radio-Canada), the government of Quebec, the City of Montreal and private enterprise (Effigis). More than 40 people participated in the event.

Many OGC standard were used and tested, such as the OGC Web Map Feature (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Processing Service (WPS), Catalog Services Web (CSW), CityGML, and KML standards. Défi GéoHack is again looking to have new innovative projects based on OGC standards. Why? Because Geospatial technologies must be fully interoperable for organisations to be able to share services with the wider community.

The hackathon will offer awards financed by sponsors. These awards will be given to the best implementations, judged by sponsor representatives and participants. The rules of the challenges will be based on the best practices (e.g. challenge, open hack, OGC standard, etc.) and transparency.

This is a tremendous opportunity for organizations that would like to test some ideas and see how they can be implemented by a team of motivated people. It is also a good opportunity for individuals to demonstrate their skills.