Can One Hackathon Unite The World?

Global Hackathon Seoul, which is striving to become the world's largest hacking event, is headed to South Korea this summer. This massive hackathon started when KJ Yoo, executive director of Global Hackathon Seoul, concluded that a positive transformation needed to be made in South Korea. He discussed this with his best friend, Benzinga's own Adam Bratt, and realized that a hackathon might be the way to pull it off. The project really took off when Yoo reached out to Mayor Park Won-soon. If nothing else, Yoo wanted to gain some of Won-soon's insight. He quietly hoped that the mayor would support his efforts. Yoo was very surprised when he received a reply just a few hours after his original email was sent. Won-soon gave Yoo the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to meet at City Hall. Yoo then enlisted in the help of Reddit (and its community of coders) to see if they could assist him in making his pitch. Yoo met with the mayor the next day, shared his passionate ideas and hoped for the best. In the end, his pitch was effective: Won-soon agreed to support the global hacking event.

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"Hackathons are great," Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square and co-founder of LaunchCode, told Benzinga. "They're good at…getting people to have fun with coding." Global Hackathon Seoul is scheduled to take place between July 29 and August 1 in Seoul, South Korea. The first-of-its-kind event hopes to bring 2,000 hackers to the event, which includes 80,000 square feet of hacking space. In an interview with Tech In Asia, Yoo referred to the event as the "Olympics of hackathons." The publication gave another description, calling it a "Korean culture infused hackathon + conference + modern job fair." That's a solid summation for an event that could prove to be a great way to land a new job or internship. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.