Page 17 - ATA

A16 LOCAL
Saturday 12 May 2018

Aruba 3rd place in hackathon Facebook

SAN JOSE - Aruba’s name “F8” and participated in
has been called in the light the hackathon. This con-
of technology in Silicon ference took place in San
Valley. The young Marko Jose, California, and only
Espinoza was invited by 5000 invites were accepted
Facebook to participate with 150 participating in the
in a conference about the hackathon.
development of software,
organized by the biggest The goal of the company
social media platform in Facebook is to create di-
the world. After a strict reg- versification with this con-
istration process with more ference and the theme of
than one million interest- the hackathon was to use
ed, Espinoza was selected Facebooks technology as For the Caribbean islands to collect the necessary in- include ideas from all over
to attend the conference tool to unite communities. and the Dutch Kingdom, formation to the problem. the world.
Espinoza was the only par- The collection of the data Espinoza is a young profes-
ticipant. He developed the will show in a map in the sional who profiled his inter-
idea how to address com- current time to visualize the est in the world of commu-
plaints about city main- problems in the different nication and technology
tenance which is a bit a prospective. A panel of jury since 2005. He is respon-
peculiar topic for a small evaluated the idea, execu- sible for the comeback of
island as Aruba. Together tion and development and Colarin, a magazine, and
with the designed software finally the Facebook app the blog of Colegio Aru-
of Chili and Kenya, Espinoza itself. Total 49 Facebook bano. He worked with sev-
came up with the idea and apps were created during eral media in the island like
solution within 8 hours. The the hackathon, three out AWEMainta, 24ora.com
group created a ‘bot’ mak- of them were selected as and ATV. Since 2009 he
ing use of Facebook’s API, winners. The concept of was working for the govern-
called ‘Ombudsbot’ which ‘OmbudsBot’ got the third ment in a key role for the
implements the Facebooks place. Facebook looks for Government Press office.
Messenger’s technology ways to implement new Currently he is in charge of
that automatically re- services that are in the ben- the daily operations of a
sponds a series of questions efit of the community and news website.q