Expedia takes a break with Techfugees

At our most recent event, top talent from Expedia Group locations across the world helped improve two projects that will make education and newcomer information more accessible.

In June 2019 to help address the needs of those displaced from their homes with the help of technology, Techfugees teamed up with Expedia Group for our second workathon ― a hackathon with a difference! Winners of our 2018 Global Challenges Competition were invited to work with Expedia Group employees to accelerate their projects using cutting-edge tools, software, and expertise.

Participating in this three-day event were a gamified child literacy app, Antura & the Letters, and another app, Integreat, that makes information accessible to newcomers.

Both these apps were assigned to teams of Expedia Group engineers, located in different countries and across time zones to help overcome challenges and clear tech backlogs. It meant setting up an effective relay system where tasks were completed in one-time zone and passed on to experts working on the next stage when they woke up.

Lending a hand around the world

Antura & the Letters was supported by 12 Expedia Group professionals, who worked across locations in Bellevue, Seattle, Montreal, Stockholm, Paris, and Gurgaon. The App benefited from Expedia Group’s product development skills and teams discovered ways to better track and collect relevant user data. The UI/UX design review and edits to the App’s Arabic text resulted in a significantly improved user experience of a game like Antura and the Letters that already has more than 200.000 downloads.

Integreat’s 20-strong team of Expedia Group experts worked across Berlin, Gurgaon, Singapore, Shenzhen, and Brisbane for assistance with software development.

They created a translation infrastructure and statistics dashboard to collate information from local municipalities and improve the app’s translation efficiency. Automated API documentation was added, helping other teams interface with the Integreat content management system. These improvements magnified the scale of the project.

Come on board for a workathon!

Expedia Group employees offered developers of Antura & the Letters and Integreat some amazing feedback and technology solutions that made them more impactful. Using their immense talent to make tangible contributions towards a more connected, friendly world was a fulfilling experience. All the employees who worked on the projects said they would participate again in another workathon and felt very satisfied with the tasks they had accomplished.

Now, it’s your turn.

Techfugees is looking for more companies to contribute a few days of their teams’ time to work with more of our project winners. Your mentoring will secure better outcomes for these important projects, enriching the global tech community in return.

Get involved with a Techfugees workathon today. Contact us 📧 hello@techfugees.com


This post was written with help of the team at Sookio.

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