The 19 Million Project - an international coalition of journalist, designers, coders, hacktivists and human rights researchers, created by CILD and Chicas Poderosas, with the support of Fusion and Univision - has officially wrapped up its first event, a two-week hackathon in Rome that brought together as many as 150 professionals from over 25 countries.
The focus of the event was a ten-day competition that challenged 13 interdisciplinary teams to create and develop - through "design thinking" - innovative projects to narrate and address the ongoing refugee crisis. The competing teams were judged by a jury composed by representatives of Fusion, Global Editors Network, Google News Lab and Berkeley Advanced Media Institute and the winners were awarded the special prize for "Innovative Media Action" during the ceremony for CILD's Civil Liberties Award.
Living museum
The first-place winner was Ultimum Refugium, a pop-up architectural installation conceived as a "living museum" to be filled with experiential story-telling installations related to the refugee crisis. Ultimum Refugium was jointly created by South African architect Nadia Tromp and Costa Rican filmmaker Elda Brizuela.
Ultimum Refugium will be a huge, amazing and completely temporary modular structure that will be able to travel from city to city and put the refugee crisis center stage in urban public spaces. Its arresting structure will attract passers-by and invite them to interact in completely new ways - thanks to its innovative story-telling installations (using interactive stories and virtual reality experiences) - with the narrative focused on the refugee crisis.
Empowering migrants
Two other teams were awarded and encouraged to actively collaborate with the development of the pop-up living museum on the refugee crisis: Migrant’s Voice, which proposes to bring video kiosks filled with digital video displaying refugees telling their stories to public spaces like universities and bus stops, thus replacing the cold numbers and statistics with human faces; and Moving Voices, a mentorship program between refugees, migrants and journalists that seeks to create a real impact on the refugee crisis by empowering migrants to tell their own stories in their own voices.
The three winning teams will receive $5,000 to help with project development expenses. Each team will also be able to pick a representative to participate at the Vienna Hackathon (to be held during the General Editors Network summit in June 2016).
The others teams, which developed projects such as a Refug-Info platform providing reliable information to refugees, a tracking tool conceived to keep safe unaccompanied minors on the move and a Marry-a-thon, are all invited to contribute their ideas for display inside Ultimum Refugium.
