Bonnaroo, Nashville’s four-day music and camping festival, hosted its first official hackathon, Hackeroo last weekend (June 8-9). In partnership with Bonnaroo founder and producer Superfly and Nashville-based Aloompa, Codemkrs recruited up to 100 developers and creatives for the 24-hour event.
“These festivals, they are new gatekeepers, where people go to find out about bands and experience the music in real life,” said Codemkrs Founder Travis Laurendine. “Opening up these festivals to technology and innovation and hacking is only going to get us closer to the future of music.”
The purpose of the event was to augment the virtual Bonnaroo experience, not replace it, through building fan-generated content apps for fans and musicians.
The grand prize was split between two teams: RooRunner.com and Roowall.com. RooRunner.com allows Bonnaroo fans to request a “runner” for any task they might need completed throughout the festival. It was created by Andre Woodley, Jr. Roowall.com was created by Corey Glenn and Debpriya Seal to create Facebook-style “walls” using fan-generated content centered around different hashtags.
Second place went to Legend of Bonnaroo, a digital scavenger hunt app. Third place went to Ask-A-Roo, a question-and-answer app limited to people at the festival.
“[The winners] will get to meet a bunch of bands and basically use the app inside the festival and have their own mini office there,” Laurendine said last week. “No one has ever had a hackathon team keep hacking inside the festival itself.”
The music festival begins today in Nashville where the apps will be inside, gaining insight about how users receive and use the apps. This will be the first time a music festival has had software developers working inside of their festival in an official capacity.