JEDDAH – To build the technology which can help streamline the Hajj process for two million Muslim pilgrims, Saudi Arabia is hosting the first-ever Hajj Hackathon in Jeddah between August 1 and 3. ProPakistani reported on July 22.

The oil-rich Gulf Kingdom looks up to technological innovators to improve the experience of pilgrims in the Holy Cities of Makkah and Madinah.

The Hackathon will be open to over 3,000 tech entrepreneurs, designers, developers, and innovators from around the world.

The Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones has partnered with Google and Egypt’s RiseUp to organize the event.

As the Hajj presents logistic challenges of accommodating millions of people and transporting them across several cities, the hackathon participants are invited to provide solutions to issues related to food, transportation, accommodation, crowd management, traffic control, waste management, and communications.

The event’s winner will be decided after judging against the criteria of designing, simplicity, creativity, and impact. Each of these criteria will have five points.

The competition has a prize pool of US$533,000 as an equity investment in their product. The other prizes of the competition include free tickets to Google IO 2019 Developers Conference in the US to be held in April-June 2019 and RiseUp Summit 2018. They will also get Google Home Mini with built-in Google Assistant.

Islamic Shari`ah is a great proponent of science and technology. It stresses greatly on the importance of learning.

Islam wants its followers to get knowledge about the things that Allah has created and bestowed so that they are better able to acknowledge His blessings.

Islam believes that any kind of knowledge whether religious or scientific that is beneficial for mankind needs to be adopted and learned. Thus, the Muslim communities are aware that it’s only on the bases of knowledge that humans could become more advanced and civilized.