This is part two in our Pega Community Hackathon profile series. In this series we profile 2021 Hackathon participants and ask them about their process for creating top-performing applications.
Pega community members around the world have been negatively impacted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and that has been especially true lately in India, home to Pega’s largest developer ecosystem. A recent Wall Street Journal article mentioned that there has been an official count of 390,000 COVID-related deaths in India, but the actual impact of COVID might actually be hundreds of thousands of deaths higher than that official number, since many have yet to be counted.
This lack of access to accurate information on COVID fatalities and illnesses inspired a team of seven developers from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to create CrisOS, a next-generation crisis management solution powered by Pega Infinity that is designed to help individuals and businesses collaborate, plan, and track responses from community members impacted by crisis or disaster-related situations.
“After a series of brainstorming sessions to prepare for the Pega Community Hackathon, we quickly zeroed in on building a crisis management solution,” said CrisOs team member Haziq Pathan. “We wanted to create something that could streamline communication during a crisis or emergency with the goal of helping people in distress so that we could possibly save lives.”
Once they made the decision to build an application focused on crisis management, the CrisOS developers went to work on creating a Pega Hackathon submission that would incorporate voice-activated assistant technology through Alexa and a range of chatbots supported by Pega. While those integrations were a challenge on their own, there were times when the greatest challenges that the CrisOS team faced had nothing to do with technology.
“Due to the pandemic, members of our team were scattered across project sites in multiple time zones,” recalled team member Sachin Kumar. “We also were all juggling project work and personal commitments in order to put together this solution in a six-week period. A few members of our team even tested positive for COVID during this process, but we helped each other get this submission over the finish line.”
Faced with extremely difficult circumstances, the CrisOS team came together to produce an application that received the Runner Up award at the 2021 Pega Community Hackathon, with a $3,000 prize.
“All of this demonstrated to us that hackathons can bring out the best in you,” Pathan concluded. “Whether we ended up as a winning team or not, we were able to implement features that would have never been possible had we worked as individuals. You never know what the end result will be. It may truly amaze you.”
You can find additional posts in the Pega Community Hackathon 2021 profile series below:
- srcLogic's journey from runner-up to best in show
- How Farm Easy is changing the future of farming
- How Aaseya is helping small businesses overcome the pandemic
Recommended resources:
- Read more about our Community Hackathon here, or read our press release.
- Check out the CrisOS submission.
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