Editor’s Note: Supporting the developer community is a priority for the FIDO Alliance and a key element to driving market adoption of FIDO Authentication standards. The Alliance currently supports developers through developer workshops, webinars and online resources. This blog post highlights a developer Hackathon that the FIDO Alliance Korea Working Group is driving in Korea.
Stay tuned for more developer content here on the blog (including updates on the Korea Hackathon) and on our Developer Resource webpage.
By Henry Lee and Sanghun Won, Co-Chairs, FIDO Alliance Korea Working Group
During the FIDO seminar in Seoul last December, the FIDO Alliance Korea Working Group announced its intentions to help make 2019 the year of FIDO deployment. In addition to helping our members with their own FIDO projects, we agreed that engaging local developers would be a key component to success. We studied various ways to support local developers, including college students and entrepreneurs, and decided that running a Hackathon would be the best avenue to reach this community.
We named it a Hackathon for easier communication of what we’re trying to accomplish, but the program is unique in that it is a hybrid of a venture-type acceleration program and a new service development competition. We structured the FIDO Hackathon in four different blocks (see Diagram 1).
After the successful launching event, we received about 40 proposals and chose 25 of them to participate in onsite presentation evaluations.
We are currently at the “develop” stage of our Hackathon, where 13 different teams who passed the presentation evaluations are diligently developing their own unique FIDO-enabled services through three-month mentorship programs (see Table 1).
Over 50 college students and entrepreneurs from 20 different organizations are participating in these mentorship programs, with development ideas covering online security, IoT, drones, retail kiosks, FinTech and blockchain. The participating FIDO members are inspired by these innovative ideas and thankful for the tremendous amount of positive energy these young minds bring to the field.
At the beginning of this process, we set four ground rules for all stakeholders: respect, compete, learn and collaborate. These rules have been well implemented and reflected throughout the program. For example, we plan and are excited to have a mentor and mentee party soon. This will be a great venue for mentees and assigned mentors to all get together under a single roof and share their activities and learn from each other.
We want to give a huge thanks to those who are actively involved in these efforts, especially to those mentors from 10 different member companies. We look forward to sharing more exciting stories and awarding our Hackathon winners at the FIDO Alliance member plenary in Seoul this September. Watch for a follow-up blog, where we tell you all about our winners!
