As recently featured in the Mashable article, A Hackathon for Happiness, the H(app)athon Project is utilizing emerging media and new discoveries in the fields of happiness/well-being science to try and evolve the GDP to a new model that includes a more holistic view of value for the world.

Heady, huh?  It’s actually pretty simple.  Your device is tracking you and getting to know your preferences.  But now objects are tracking you as well, and in one sense algorithms are making choices for you.  You’re measuring your actions with apps (Quantified Self), and optimizing behavior.  And, world leaders are realizing GDP is a broken way to best analyze citizen’s well-being, so they’re looking towards a larger, economic form of ‘happiness’ to see how they can better help those that they serve.  What does this picture provide?  The world’s biggest and most rewarding Big Data hack ever.

Our event is about teaching you the geeky stuff, but then quickly playing a game where YOU help design the hardware and software (using your awesome imaginations – we’ll be doing actual building/hackathons down the road) that will change make the world Get H(app)y. Our vision is that technology should have a framework and a direction – happiness (or well-being, meaning economic and holistic happiness) – versus the metric  we have now – which is NOTHING.  We have no common global ethical or technological standards around how all this awesome stuff works.  So why not choose h(app)iness?

This is why we need your help – we don’t have a final answer for h(app)iness.  Just a direction and a bunch of awesome people herding cyber-cats but it won’t make sense unless we can crowdsource a digital Happiness Indicator.

Sign up at happathon.com to get our newsletter, take our Mobile Happiness Indicator Survey (mHIS) and join our 12-month journey to design and experience holistic well-being.  And if you’re in NYC on February 19th, help us do the first public beta-test of this H(app)athon H(app)etizer Workshop where we’ll play a game that designs a new, and h(app)ier world.

Who Should Attend

This event is targeted at anyone interested in the science of happiness/well being, Big Data, The Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and the myriad of ways data and people are being measured now and in the future. We’ll be discussing the ethical, moral, technological and economic ramifications and opportunities of a connected world that can will either be largely unstructured or one that could have a framework of well-being as a primary measurement of success.

The participants on the panel will include members of the H(app)athon Committee, a group of people studying how to make the metrics described above, and how to measure them, a reality. Members include representatives from the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Cambridge University, Salesforce, Microsoft, Quantified Self, and over a dozen other experts in the fields of well-being/Big Data.

Participants in the audience will take away a solid understanding of the science of well being as it relates to economics as well as a clear sense of how many mobile phone apps/platforms currently exist to help people find balance for their own health, their communities, and the world at large.