Office of Enterprise Technology Services

HONOLULU – A University of Hawaii team, called Gary’s Best, took home the $4,000 top prize at the Hawaii Annual Code Challenge (HACC) over the weekend.  The team came up with an innovative solution for a challenge sponsored by the State Office of Energy and Hawaiian Electric Company.  The challenge was for the creation of dashboard displaying the health of an electric vehicle charging station using key metrics developed from charging data analysis.

Winners:

Prize	Team	Challenge
1st place $4,000	Gary’s Best	Electric Vehicle Charging Station Analysis
2nd Place $2,000	Kulu	Green Loan Portal
3rd place $1,000	Area 51 Raid Squad	Electric Vehicle Charging Station Analysis
High School (tie) $500 each team	Netjxrk (Waipahu High School) SHC (Mililani High School)	Sustainability Education Electric Vehicle Charging Station Analysis

“I’m proud that Hawaii is home to a very talented group of IT developers as demonstrated at the HACC. They created imaginative solutions to some of our state’s pressing challenges. Congratulations to the winners, and mahalo to all who participated,” said Gov. David Ige.

“It was exciting to see all of the innovative solutions from the participants.  We will work with the teams to develop them further and implement in state departments,” Doug Murdock, Office of Enterprise Technology Services Chief Information Officer added.

“Hawai‘i Pacific University was proud to serve with the State of Hawai‘i to present the Hawai‘i Annual Code Challenge (HACC), representing our university’s commitment to embracing the concept and the pursuit of innovation to advance our state,” said HPU President John Gotanda. “At HPU, our approach to education is to ensure experiential, hands-on learning opportunities for our students, and the structure of the HACC program is in keeping with our academic vision.”

Twenty-nine teams were formed after #hacc2019 kicked off four weeks ago.  After the technical review, 15 teams moved on to the presentation phase of the competition, which took place on Saturday, Nov. 16 at Hawaii Pacific University, Aloha Tower Marketplace.   This competition, inspired by Gov. Ige, is in its fourth year.

The HACC generated proof-of-concepts by student, amateur and professional coders to benefit community and State agencies to support sustainability at the idea-phase level, feeding into Hawai’i’s vibrant innovation ecosystem to promote solutions for community resilience, professional development, local job creation and building local businesses.

The HACC breaks the mold of a traditional hackathon, which typically takes place over a single day or weekend. The HACC provides an expanded multi-week timeframe meant to encourage interaction between community teams and state department personnel, ultimately resulting in sustainable solutions that are appropriately matched with technologies and platforms in use or being considered by the state. Beginning at the HACC Kickoff, community participants form teams and select from a list of challenges.

Gov. David Ige’s vision for the HACC when it began in 2015 included providing an opportunity for civic engagement with the local technology community in modernizing state functions and services for a more effective, efficient and open government.

The HACC is nationally recognized with the State IT Innovation of the Year award by StateScoop, the leading government IT media company in the nation’s capital.

Sponsors of the event included Hawaiian Airlines, Kaiser Permanente, Transform Hawai‘i Government, AT&T, Hawaii Information Consortium, Unisys, Salesforce-Carahsoft, Verizon, HawaiiData Collaborative, revacomm, and DRFortress. Community partners include Hawai‘i Green Growth, Hawaii Technology Development Corporation, Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training, Olelo, Sultan Ventures and XLR8HI.

For More Information:  hacc.hawaii.gov