Public-School Innovation Hackathon

This was Idea Pública’s official debut: on October 27, 2017, the lab opened its doors as a service any government entity in Costa Rica could request, and this hackathon with the Municipality of Montes de Oca was the first project to test it. Held at UCR’s Facultad de Ciencias Económicas from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., it brought together 60 to 80 people: students from public and private colegios across the canton, municipal officials, UCR facilitators and Public Administration students, and observers following the process. I was part of the team that organized the event from the ground up and facilitated the workshop itself.

The brief was broad: design the canton’s future city, covering services and infrastructure, support for the most vulnerable populations, youth participation in local government, the environment, and employment. To get “outside the box” answers, we ran the day as a full design-thinking process, walking students and officials through the same methodology side by side rather than treating either group as a passive stakeholder.

As Professor Adriana Núñez Picado, the EAP faculty member who championed Idea Pública, put it at the time, this was meant to be a more creative, horizontal model of public management, not a hierarchical one where citizens only receive services instead of proposing solutions. From that day forward, the lab was open for any government entity to request the same process for its own public problems.