Hackathon 2019
On October 4-6, the DigiServe team, in partnership with SIL, hosted their 4th Annual Hackathon. This year’s main project was called Bible Karaoke. The tagline was: Automatically create read-along karaoke videos from existing Scripture text and audio.
About 30 people came on Friday night where we played an interactive introduction game after a pizza dinner. We heard from the Project Creator regarding the potential value of the Bible Karaoke project and split into various teams to start breaking down the work and designing a solution.
One specific goal in the context is increased ability of pastors to learn to read the Scriptures in their language so they can start using it in church, preaching from it, and sharing it with others in their communities. Right now, most pastors are feeling skittish about trying to read their own language, especially when they are already proficient in reading the Bible in another language. They don’t want to look silly in front of the congregation, trying to sound out a word with everyone watching. The community has requested these kind of videos as something that will help church leaders to privately practice so they can have confidence to try reading it publicly.
On Saturday, the hard programming work began and each group started making progress.
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, the team starting integrating their work in order to produce a demo. While each group could show results, the integration of each team’s work proved very challenging. Ultimately, we created a very strong foundation and a mostly working product in only 1.5 days of programming.
The DigiServe team decided to at least fully integrate and produce a functional product so they put aside one extra day to work on it further. Here is a sample of the latest work. We hope to deliver this first version to our partners in the field by early December.